The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

There's a bit of the buccaneer in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's approach to her second novel, The Pirate's Daughter.

Setting her story against the steamy intersection of glamorous Hollywood and old-time Jamaica, she plunders history and pillages lives to tell an intricate tale of love and betrayal. The result is a glittering trove of fact, history, and fancy.

The Forgotten Spirit by Evie Rhodes

On the surface, Jamie Lynne Brooks looks like your ordinary nine-year-old girl. She likes to skip, laugh, and play. But Jamie is far from ordinary. She has been blessed with a magical gift -- a gift that will transform Jamie's world and all of the people in it this holiday season...

Although her loving grandparents have raised Jamie in a protective cocoon, Jamie is wise to the harsh realities of the tough neighborhood she calls home. And her mother's absence from her life has only made Jamie wiser beyond her years. Yet she has managed to hold onto hope -- hope for a better life for her grandparents, hope that her mother will return someday, and hope for anyone who's lost their way.

After all, Christmas is a time for miracles...

Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black: and Other Stories by Nadine Gorimer

"You’re not responsible for your ancestry, are you . . . But if that’s so, why have marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters . . . The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognizes it."

In this collection of new stories Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather’s fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. “Dreaming of the Dead” conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in “History” is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped.“Alternative Endings” considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories—and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.

No Turning Back: My Summer with Daddy King by Gurdon Brewster

In the summer of 1961, Brewster, a white seminary student from the North, worked at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where both Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. were pastors. In this moving memoir, he recalls his first encounters with Atlanta's segregated restrooms, restaurants and public swimming pools, and describes finding the spontaneous church services of the black Baptist tradition both unnerving and energizing. When local white ministers didn't embrace Brewster's idea of setting up meetings between black and white church youth groups, Brewster's eyes were opened about the intransigent racism of ostensibly moderate white clergy. (Less dramatically, Brewster also learned about that staple of Southern cuisine, grits, during his Atlanta summer.)

Brewster's book is valuable not only for the record of his own awakenings, but for the personal anecdotes about King Sr., who emerges as a passionate, wise man with a sense of humor equal to his sense of justice. Though Brewster is not attempting to analyze the Civil Rights movement, he does offer useful insights about the importance of hymnody in black churches' freedom struggle.

Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon

Kalisha Buckhanon writes novels, plays and short stories. Her first novel, Upstate (St. Martin's Press, January 2005), won the 2006 American Library Association's Alex Award and was been nominated for a Hurston/Wright Award in the category of Debut Fiction.

East Cleveland Public Library has ordered Kalisha's second novel, Conception, and it will be published by St. Martin's Press in February 2008.