African-American Books

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

2009-12-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond.

And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.

Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.

To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

Total Eclipse of the Heart by Zane

2009-11-03T09:43:00.000-08:00

Brooke Alexander, a waitress who has self-esteem issues regarding her lackluster existence and her fluctuating weight is in love with Patrick Sterling, one of the most prominent attorneys in Washington, D.C. On his good days, Patrick is the man in every woman's dream. On his bad days, Patrick's behavior is demeaning and he is angry at the world.

Damon Johnson, who's been married to Carleigh for four years, is one of "the last good men" -- compassionate and honest, he worships the ground his wife walks on. But Carleigh treats Damon like a trophy husband, allowing her friends to salivate over him and disrespect their happy home. Damon has dreams beyond his six-figure corporate job and Carleigh views his life aspirations as a joke. Her selfish nature makes Damon wonder if he made the right decision when he asked for her hand in marriage.

When a tragic event causes Brooke's and Damon's lives to intersect, truths unfold as they begin to reflect on their own relationships.

A Deep Dark Secret by Kimberla Lawson Roby

2009-10-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

On the outside, twelve-year-old Jillian Maxwell is the perfect child. She's helpful with chores around the house, gets straight As in school, has plans for college, and stays out of trouble. She seems to have everything a girl could want: a big, beautiful new home, an adoring little sister, a mother who cares about her, and an attentive stepfather.

But inside, Jillian harbors a terrible secret.

Too frightened to tell, convinced that her friends and loved ones, especially her mother, won't understand—and worse, will blame her—Jillian endures her pain in silence, believing that things will get better. However, as time passes and her dilemma intensifies, the bright, hardworking girl becomes sullen and disinterested in her studies. Then, just when it seems she's on the verge of losing everything, Jillian discovers she has more strength than she ever imagined…and the power to change her fate.

Resurrecting Midnight by Eric Jerome Dickey

2009-08-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

International assassin Gideon spilled blood for the first time when he was seven years old, with a single shot to the head of a man who was attempting to kill the woman Gideon had known as his mother. The victim was none other than his own father, a man of unspeakable evil. This pivotal event shaped Gideon throughout his life, made him who he is, one of the fiercest, most feared hired guns in the world. And one of the most hunted.

After nearly losing his life in Antigua during a mission that went terribly wrong, Gideon trusts no one. But when a former lover and grifter, Arizona, resurfaces in need of his skills, she reminds him he was indebted to a man who had once saved his life: the son of the legendary con-man Scamz. Gideon is forced to take on an assignment which will lead him to Argentina in pursuit of a briefcase containing one part of a larger puzzle. The "package" contains material that another group of assassins – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – will kill to obtain and protect. One of the leaders of the Four Horsemen has a connection to Gideon that neither man is aware of -- a connection that will be exposed when they meet face-to-face and gun-to-gun. Each member of The Four Horsemen is a world-class killer, each with a dark and dangerous past, and nothing will stop that team of renegades from completing their mission.

God Ain't Blind by Mary Monroe

2009-08-26T11:56:00.001-07:00

Annette Goode Davis is a survivor, and while life's obstacles have often knocked her down, she's never let them keep her there for long. To Annette, life is all about family and old friends like Rhoda O'Toole. And right now, Annette needs all the friends she can get…because her marriage is in big trouble, and she has no idea why…

Lately, her husband Pee Wee barely has the time of day for Annette and she suspects he may have fallen for another woman. Desperate to regain his affections, Annette goes on a crash diet, gets a total makeover, and looks hotter than she has for a long, long time. Everyone notices—everyone except Pee Wee.

Alibi by Teri Woods

2009-08-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

Lance, Nard, and Jeremy think they've found the perfect opportunity-the chance to rob a rival drug dealer without getting caught. The plan was simple...get in, get the drugs, and get out. Everything was going as planned until something went horribly wrong and someone is killed. The three take off running and just as they are about to make a clean get-away, Nard spots neighboring children hanging out of their apartment window. Not wanting to kill anyone else, they all escape, but now the question is, will the witnesses give up their identity?

Once they make it to safety, they realize that they need to come up with a plan and fast. The first option is death, but they've already killed one too many. Another body would only add more heat to the fire. Not wanting to take any chances, the trio decides to come up with a plausible alibi. If they don't, it could mean life in prison, or death on the streets.

The Devil is a Lie by ReShonda Tate Billingsley

2009-07-21T06:39:00.001-07:00

4-7-14-17-21-25. Those numbers, printed on a slim paper ticket, are about to change the lives of two couples, lovers past and present, in Houston. When Nina Lawson wins $16 million in the Texas Lotto, the real estate executive and her fiancé, personal trainer Rick Henderson, ecstatically begin planning their future -- from paying off their credit card debt, to setting their wedding date, to a spontaneous, spare-no-expense island getaway.

But while counting her millions, Nina didn't count on one other astounding twist of fate: her ex-husband, Todd Lawson, isn't her ex anything -- since the paperwork for their divorce was never officially filed. Now he's shown up with his money-hungry girlfriend, Pam, to claim half of Nina's winnings. Add to this the relatives coming out of the woodwork to seek a payday for themselves, and Nina must ask herself if scoring a fortune in cash comes with too high a price tag. With a little bit of luck, Nina will discern the real wealth in her heart, not just her bank account -- or risk losing everything -- to find out what matters the most.

Friends and Fauxs by Tracie Howard

2009-07-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

Gillian Tillman learned all about landing a wealthy man from her globe-trotting mother, Imelda, but this second-generation gold digger has a style all her own. With big dreams of becoming a huge star, she slept her way right into the million-dollar mansion of her now-husband, star-producer Brandon Russell. He not only launched Gillian’s film career, but landed her the starring and Oscar-nominated role in the hit film Gold Diggers.

But all that glitters may not be gold. Gillian wrestles with the real possibility that Brandon may be a mob-connected money launderer, and worse yet, may have had a hand in the murder of her friend Paulette. When pictures of her naked surface on the Internet, both Gillian’s Oscar dreams and her marriage are threatened, even though she swears they aren’t of her. Meanwhile her best friends are struggling with issues of their own. Reese’s beloved son falls ill and she’s forced to decide between spilling a long-kept secret and saving his life, and Lauren’s hard-won happiness is threatened by a shocking betrayal.

Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

2009-06-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

Still reeling from divorce and feeling estranged from her teenage son, Trish Taylor is in the midst of salvaging the remnants of her life when she uncovers a shocking secret: her sister is alive. For years Trish believed that her mother and infant sister had died in a car accident. But the truth is that her mother fatally overdosed and that Trish's grandparents put the baby girl up for adoption because her father was black.

After years of drawing on the strength of her black ancestors, Billie Cousins is shocked to discover that she was adopted. Just as surprising, after finally overcoming a series of health struggles, she is pregnant-a dream come true for Billie but a nightmare for her sweetie, Nick, and for her mother, both determined to protect Billie from anything that may disrupt her well-being.

Jericho's Fall by Stephen L. Carter

2009-06-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies.

Maneater by Mary B. Morrison and Noire

2009-06-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

"Character of a Man" by Mary B. Morrison
Seven Stephens seems to have it all-money, mansion and a man-but is taken by surprise when her fiancé tells her the wedding is off if she can't lose twenty-five pounds in six weeks. In no time, she's out the door and headed for Punany Paradise for a sensual workout that's both sweet revenge and sweet surrender....

"Sugar-Honey-Ice Tee" by Noire
Blow, Nap, and Tomere are three grimy playahs from the hood. Nicknamed Dirty, Dastardly, and Depraved, these three NFL stars have no problem living up to their names on and off the field. But when they scheme to take out their biggest competition, a promising quarterback, they finally meet their match. Not in a vengeful ball player, but in three wicked and sexy sistahs. And it won't take Sugar, Honey, or Ice Tee long to wreck everything in their path. Because vicious hotties always take whatever they want and ruin whatever they please...

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

2009-05-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Jay Porter is hardly the lawyer he set out to be. His most promising client is a low-rent call girl and he runs his fledgling law practice out of a dingy strip mall. But he's long since made peace with not living the American Dream and carefully tucked away his darkest sins: the guns, the FBI file, the trial that nearly destroyed him.

Houston, Texas, 1981. It is here that Jay believes he can make a fresh start. That is, until the night in a boat out on the bayou when he impulsively saves a woman from drowning—and opens a Pandora's box. Her secrets put Jay in danger, ensnaring him in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice, his family, and even his life. But before he can get to the bottom of a tangled mystery that reaches into the upper echelons of Houston's corporate power brokers, Jay must confront the demons of his past.

Obsessed by Devon Scott

2009-05-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

After five fulfilling years of marriage, Michael and Kennedy are the envy of their tight circle of friends. Michael is even more passionate about his stunning, successful wife than he was when they first met, and he is everything Kennedy has ever wanted in a man. Life is going pretty well. But everything changes when the couple starts getting mysterious phone calls and threatening emails. Michael and Kennedy are being stalked—and the stress has their once rock-solid marriage unraveling.

Who could want to hurt Michael and Kennedy? Plenty of people, it seems. For the couple is hiding an intimate secret few people know about...and when it's revealed, nothing will ever be the same...

The Next Best Thing by Deidre Berry

2009-04-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

No drama, no problems—that's Tori Carter's idea of the good life. Her tendency to plan everything to the max has made her the most successful event coordinator in the business—and the number one problem solver for her family and friends. But when her perfect fiancé runs off with another woman, he leaves Tori without a Plan B-through-Z...or any idea what to do next. And now she's dealing with one surprise after another.

Her well-meaning friends are delivering a rogue's gallery of bad-news dates. Her demanding boss expects Tori to work miracles with ever-more-impossible clients. And Tori's handsome neighbor Nelson is a chef who turns up the heat in ways she never imagined. Now Tori has to improvise, let loose—and get wise—if she's going to figure out who she is and what kind of happiness she really wants...

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

2009-04-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school—when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria—his social doom is sealed for the next four years.

But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is.

There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of ’85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer.

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

2009-03-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL , PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. It’s a name that takes a little explaining, but he’s used to it.

Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill’s an old-school P.I. working a city that’s gotten fancy all around him. Fancy or not, he has always managed to get by—keep a roof over the head of his wife and kids, and still manage a little fun on the side—mostly because he’s never been above taking a shady job for a quick buck. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent.”

New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets—and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. That’s exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2009-03-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

2009-03-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

The Book of Night Women is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they—and she—will come to both revere and fear.

The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link.

That Devil's No Friend of Mine by J.D. Mason

2009-02-24T16:28:00.000-08:00

When Bishop Fontaine passed away, he left behind more than a list of good deeds. He was known as a caring friend and doting father...but he was also manipulative and controlling, especially to those he loved.

His death begins to unravel deep secrets and shocking desires among the people he cared most about. Five very different people whose lives are only connected by Bishop suddenly find themselves up close and personal as desires, dreams and passions collide.

2009-02-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

Johnnie Wise's grandmother, Josephine Baptiste, at age sixteen, has just been promised in marriage to the heir-apparent to the throne of Nigeria. A life of riches and royalty may appeal to some girls her age, but she's not about to enter a loveless union with someone old enough to be her father. Especially since she’s in love with his much younger brother…

The night before the marriage is set to take place, she and her lover decide to take a chance on their romance and flee. Their freedom is short-lived, however, when they’re captured by Dutch slave traders and taken aboard a ship about to sail to the Americas. Landing in Santa Domingo, they’re sold together to a wealthy plantation owner as they prepare to embark on a life of servitude. But how long will they suffer their new state before they try to escape? And will their love survive lust, lies and power struggles in their New World?

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins

2009-02-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

On Bernadine Brown's fifty-second birthday she received an unexpected gift—she caught her husband, Leo, cheating with his secretary. She was hurt—angry, too—but she didn't cry woe is me. Nope, she hired herself a top-notch lawyer and ended up with a cool $275 million. Having been raised in the church, she knew that when much is given much is expected, so she asked God to send her a purpose.

The purpose turned out to be a town: Henry Adams, Kansas, one of the last surviving townships founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The failing town had put itself up for sale on the Internet, so Bernadine bought it. Trent July is the mayor, and watching the town of his birth slide into debt and foreclosure is about the hardest thing he's ever done. When the buyer comes to town, he's impressed by her vision, strength, and the hope she wants to offer not only to the town and its few remaining residents, but to a handful of kids in desperate need of a second chance.

Not everyone in town wants to get on board though; they don't want change. But Bernadine and Trent, along with his first love, Lily Fontaine, are determined to preserve the town's legacy while ushering in a new era with ties to its unique past and its promising future

Before I Forget by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

2009-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

Moses Johnson isn't an old man—though he's a long way beyond his glory days as one of the most popular soul stars of the 70s. But at just about 50, he's shattered to learn that he's developing early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. The prospect is bleak; he's only got a brief amount of time before he loses his memory, and his conscious self, altogether. Mo's been lucky, and he knows it—more successful than most, with at least one unforgettable hit to his name—but there's plenty in his life he regrets.

Most of those regrets have to do with his son, Trey—who Mo's largely ignored for most of 19 years, whose fortunes have taken a turn for the worse when he gets caught up in a stickup gone bad organized by bad-news friend from the hood. And with his own father, Jack, who he hasn't spoken to for almost three decades, after the tragic violent death of his mother. When he learns his father is dying from cancer, Mo decides to take Trey west, from their home in Baltimore, on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles, where he grew up and where Jack still lives.

Life is Short But Wide by J. California Cooper

2009-01-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so deftly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early twentieth century, Irene and Val fall in love in Wideland. While carving out a home for themselves, they also allow neighbors Bertha and Joseph to build a house and live on their land.

The next generation brings two girls for Irene and Val, and a daughter for Bertha and Joseph. As the families cope with changing times and fortunes, and people are born and pass away, the characters learn the importance of living one's life boldly and squeezing out every possible moment of joy, while being held up by a strong foundation of love and the ultimate realization that whoever you are, and whatever you do, life is short, but it is also wide.

The Company We Keep by Mary Monroe

2009-01-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

Gorgeous, successful executive Teri Stewart spends her days working for L.A.'s hottest record company-and her nights all alone. Her best friend Nicole is determined to find Teri a man, but she hasn't had much luck...because Teri wants more than Mr. Maybe. She's holding out for Mr. Right and won't settle for anything less. Just when Teri is ready to give up, a man from her past returns to reignite their romance. With his sultry smile and easy-going charm, radio DJ Harrison Starr is one-of-a kind-and Teri can't deny she's fallen hard for him again.

With her life finally falling into place, Teri thinks her dreams might come true after all. But Harrison may have a secret that could change everything.

The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifil

2008-12-27T12:33:00.001-08:00

Veteran journalist Gwen Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation.

Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

The Black Girl Next Door by Jennifer Baszile

2008-12-15T11:46:00.001-08:00

At six years of age, after winning a foot race against a white classmate, Jennifer Baszile was humiliated to hear her classmate explain that black people "have something in their feet to make them run faster than white people." When she asked her teacher about it, it was confirmed as true. The next morning, Jennifer's father accompanied her to school, careful to "assert himself as an informed and concerned parent and not simply a big, black, dangerous man in a first-grade classroom."

This was the first of many skirmishes in Jennifer's childhood-long struggle to define herself as "the black girl next door" while living out her parents' dreams. Success for her was being the smartest and achieving the most, with the consequence that much of her girlhood did not seem like her own but more like the "family project." But integration took a toll on everyone in the family when strain in her parents' marriage emerged in her teenage years, and the struggle to be the perfect black family became an unbearable burden.

We Take This Man by Candice Dow

2008-12-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

Dwight and Tracey Wilson are living the ideal life with their two children in a brand new home in Florida. They are both excited when Dwight is offered a promotion at work, but the downside is that the job is located in Maryland. After much discussion, Tracey decides that she does not want to leave their new house. Dwight makes the decision to accept the position and return home on weekends.

Alicia Dixon has spent her life hating and not trusting men after her father mistreated her mother, but she can't help but fall for the new guy in her company...Dwight. They both try to fight their attraction to one another, but it proves to be a losing battle-Alicia is everything that his southern wife is not.

When Alicia ends up pregnant, Dwight decides to end things with Tracey, but the process proves not to be as easy as Dwight had hoped.

The Best of Everything by Kimberla Lawson Roby

2008-12-02T10:31:00.001-08:00

Alicia Black Sullivan swore to never repeat her father's mistakes: she would never break any promises, she would never be unfaithful. And most important of all, when she got married, it would be for good.

And she really does love Phillip, the assistant pastor of her father's church. She just happens to love money—and the things it can buy—as well. Alicia was born to the good life, she's entitled to the best, and she'll do anything to get it. Even if it means piling up thousands of dollars in debt. Even if it means denying to everyone—even herself—that her love of shopping has gotten way out of control.

Before long, Phillip begins to wonder if marrying the woman of his dreams was a huge mistake. Alicia has similar thoughts. Deep down, though, she knows a whopper of an emotional bill is coming due. And all the regrets in the world won't change the fact that she may be more like her infamous father than she could have imagined—or feared.

Up to No Good by Carl Weber

2008-11-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

There is always a man around the corner. And church trustee James Black should know—he’s usually that very man, carrying on affairs with married women and sleeping with one conquest after another. He has charm and good looks, and he knows how to use them. But when the tables turn and he suddenly finds himself in love with the woman of his dreams, he’s not the only one who’s surprised. And his marriage proposal quickly generates a ripple effect of shocking proportions...

The other women in James’s neighborhood have a thing or two to say about James’s new love. His daughter Jamie, only six months younger than his new fiancé, has every intention of dismantling his new relationship. But her plate becomes full when she discovers a mystery woman has been secretly calling her lover, Louis.

James’s son Darnel always swore he would not grow up to become a player like his father. His life is the picture of monogamy and devotion—until he catches his fiancée cheating and decides to follow in his father’s womanizing footsteps.

James knows he’s largely to blame for the turmoil that surrounds him and his loved ones. And now he’s going to have to find a way to bring peace to his loved one’s lives. But the only way he can do this is by facing some hard truths about himself and changing his own scandalous ways.

Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris

2008-11-17T16:42:00.000-08:00

Aldridge James “AJ” Richardson is living the good life. He has a gorgeous town house in always-flavorful New Orleans, plenty of frequent-flier miles from jet-setting around the country on a whim, and an MBA—but he’s never had to work a regular job. He owes it all to his longtime lover, Dray Jones. Dray Jones the rich and famous NBA star. They fell in love in college when AJ was hired to tutor Dray, a freshman on the basketball team.

But Dray knew if he wanted to make it to the big time, he must juggle his public image and his private desires. Built on a deep, abiding love, their hidden relationship sustains them both, but when Dray’s teammates begin to ask insinuating questions about AJ, Dray puts their doubts to rest by marrying Judi, a beautiful and ambitious woman. Judi knows nothing about Dray’s “other life.” Or does she?

Freeman Walker by David Allan Cates

2008-11-05T08:35:00.000-08:00

At the age of seven a mulatto slave boy with an indomitable spirit, Jimmy Gates, is freed by his owner-father, separated from his mother and everything he holds dear, and sent to England for an education. Four years later when his father drowns at sea, leaving him bereft, Jimmy is apprenticed to a London workhouse where he spends six hard years making saddles, reading heroic novels to his companions, finding the comfort of prostitutes, and discovering the inspirational speeches of an Irish revolutionary name Cornelius O Keefe, or O Keefe of the Sword.

At eighteen, dreaming himself a warrior and a hero, he returns to the states intending to rescue his mother. Both blessed and cursed by his late father s words-to-live-by and armed with his free papers and a copy of the Declaration of Independence, Jimmy grows into manhood while he s on the battlefields of the Civil War and in the gold camps of the American West, repeatedly forced to reckon the joys, terrors, and ironies of his freedom. He also discovers chameleon-like ability to shift identities and re-invent himself along the way.

Pecking Order by Omar Tyree

2008-10-27T11:17:00.000-07:00

Starting with a simple plan to promote business network events among the rich, famous, and frivolous clients he works with, Ivan Davis begins to make a name for himself. He soon comes face-to-face with Lucina Gallo, the reigning diva of San Diego's nightlife culture. She needs a new partner she can trust, and one who knows everything about money.

For this dollar-hungry entrepreneur, the timing couldn't be better. Who wouldn't want to be partners with the most glamorous girl in the city? Ivan quickly teams up with her for business -- and for possible pleasure. However, for Lucina, business is business and nothing extra. Or is it?

After throwing a sizzling-hot birthday party for a popular San Diego Charger, Ivan finds himself babysitting Lucina's so-called girlfriends, some of the most spoiled and exotic women he has ever encountered. That's when the business deals begin to fall outside the bounds of simple promotion and parties. Ivan finds himself thrust into the limelight and lands at the doorstep of easy access to women, cash, cars, private jets, and multimillion-dollar real estate. But as the ridiculous amounts of money and power start to pile up, leaving a trail of broken hearts, fractured egos, and challenged loyalties, Ivan is forced to ask himself: How much money is enough?

Dying for Revenge by Eric Jerome Dickey

2008-10-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

Hit man Giedon is finally back for another installment of murder, mayhem, and love. In this globe-trotting sequel and exciting sequel to Sleeping with Strangers and Waking with Enemies, Gideon enters the steamy, seedy underworld of crime and squares off with his most intriguing and and mysterious adversary yet.

Midnight by Sister Soulja

2008-10-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

Souljah's follow-up to her bestselling novel, TheColdest Winter Ever, is another gritty coming-of-age tale, picking up the story of Midnight (a character in The Coldest Winter Ever) as he tries desperately to navigate American culture, Brooklyn streets and the dicey business of growing up. The novel begins as seven-year-old Midnight and his pregnant mother, Umma, are forced to leave their privileged life in Sudan for a hardscrabble American existence.

Midnight spends his formative years in Brooklyn guiding and translating for his loyal, loving and talented mother, helping her get a factory job while encouraging her to start a clothing line. Eventually, Midnight starts working at a Chinatown fish shop, finds love, joins a dangerous hustler's basketball league and tries to disentangle his ambivalent feelings toward romance, family and personal honor.

The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley

2008-09-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

Living in South Central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict, still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Now freed after serving twenty-seven years in prison, he is filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets. Along with his gambler friend Billy Psalms, Socrates calls together local people of all races from their different social stations—lawyers, gangsters, preachers, Buddhists, businessmen—to conduct meetings of a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss the unanswerable questions in life.

The street philosopher enjoins his friends to explore—even in the knowledge that there’s nothing that they personally can do to change the ways of the world—what might be done anyway, what it would take to change themselves. Infiltrated by undercover cops, and threatened by strain from within, tensions rise as hot-blooded gangsters and respectable deacons fight over issues of personal and social responsibility. But simply by asking questions about racial authenticity, street justice, infidelity, poverty, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference.

Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

2008-09-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They’ve just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it’s not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe’s not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family’s poverty, he starts to sell drugs.

He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe’s downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins’ parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins

Loving Cee Cee Johnson by Linda Leigh Hargrove

2008-09-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

The shame had driven her away, prompted her to change her first name, and adopt a new hometown. Nothing good can come out of Pettigrew, at least that's what Celine "Cee Cee" Johnson, a successful TV reporter and journalist, thinks. Pettigrew loomed over Cee Cee like a huge animal that would not go away, and now she must deal with the past when she returns to her hometown on assignment.

Haunted by the traumatic events of her childhood, Cee Cee's mask begins to crack as she uncovers family secrets and finds out what really happened the night her black Jesues figurine as thrown into the fire. She is challenged as she discovers the truth about her life, and especially by the playwright who wants to tell the world about her past.

Circle of Stone by Verne Jackson

2008-09-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

A group of friends fights to overcome severe opposition in this empowering novel, which takes place in Arkansas during the Great Depression. When Ralph, a young black boy from Colored Town, is unfairly accused of murdering two white people, his death by lynching seems inescapable. But when Dave Bailey and the group known as "The Circle" rescue Ralph and his family by giving them the resources to leave town before any arrest or real harm is done, an important shift of power occurs in Colored Town.

Tired of the brutality forced upon them, the men and women of The Circle are committed to unity and overcoming injustice by any means necessary. The success in their endeavors is a moving testament to the power of educated activism and the strength of taking a unified stand.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

2008-09-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.

Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

In the Night of the Heat by Blair Underwood

2008-08-19T15:32:00.000-07:00

Threatened with death after acquittal for murder, football superstar T. D. Jackson asks struggling actor and former gigolo Tennyson Hardwick for protection. Tennyson has a reputation in Hollywood after solving the murder of rapper Afrodite, but politely turns Jackson down: His acting career is taking off with a new series, and he's trying to work out his personal life after a series of wrong turns.

But Tennyson's life is upturned when his seedy past catches up to him on the set of his TV series. Then T. D. Jackson is found dead in his home, the victim of an apparent suicide.

T.D.'s gorgeous cousin, Melanie, is sure the superstar was murdered, and Jackson's family offers Tennyson an irresistible fee to discover the truth. But prying into T. D. Jackson's death means answering the question that divided a nation and destroyed a film star and a football icon's life and career: Did T. D. Jackson kill his wife?

When the investigation takes an unexpected turn toward the governor's mansion and a long-forgotten football game in the segregated South of the 1960s, Tennyson uncovers secrets tearing at the heart of two dynasties and must rely on all of his assets -- his actor's heart, deadly hands, profiler's mind, and every other part of his body -- to keep from dying next.

The Sacred Place by Daniel Black

2008-08-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1955, fourteen-year-old Clement enters a general store in Money, Mississippi, to purchase a soda. Unaware of the consequences of flouting the rules governing black-white relations in the South, the Chicago native defies tradition by laying a dime on the counter and turns to depart. Miss Cuthbert, the store attendant, demands that he place the money in her hand, but he refuses, declaring "I ain't no slave!" and exits with a sense of entitlement unknown to black people at the time. His behavior results in his brutal murder. This event sparks a war in Money, forcing the black community to galvanize its strength in pursuit of equality.

Going Down South by Bonnie J. Glover

2008-08-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

When fifteen-year-old Olivia Jean finds herself in the “family way,” her mother, Daisy, who has never been very maternal, springs into action. Daisy decides that Olivia Jean can’t stay in New York and whisks her away to her grandmother’s farm in Alabama to have the baby–even though Daisy and her mother, Birdie, have been estranged for years. When they arrive, Birdie lays down the law: Sure, her granddaughter can stay, but Daisy will have to stay as well. Though Daisy is furious, she has no choice.

Now, under one little roof in the 1960s Deep South, three generations of spirited, proud women are forced to live together. One by one, they begin to lose their inhibitions and share their secrets. And as long-guarded truths emerge, a baby is born–a child with the power to turn these virtual strangers into a real, honest-to-goodness family.

She Had it Coming by Mary Monroe

2008-07-30T12:46:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing Dolores Reese knows, it's how to keep a secret. It's a skill she learned early in life, watching her best friend Valerie Proctor do whatever it took to protect her family from her violent stepfather. Back then, Dolores was in foster care-just like Floyd Watson, a local boy who intrigues Dolores from the moment they meet. Even in high school, Dolores knows with certainty that she and Floyd are soul mates. When one bad decision sends an innocent Floyd to prison for life, Dolores pays clandestine visits and-out of a mix of love and pity-promises to stick by him.

While Floyd's world stands still, Dolores's horizons open up in exciting new ways when she lands a position working for a cruise line. There, she meets Paul Dunne, an accomplished businessman who promises her the kind of future she's always wanted-the kind she once imagined having with Floyd. Dolores is sure she can continue to visit Floyd without revealing that she's now married to another man. But when Floyd is suddenly freed on new evidence, Dolores is torn and makes a fateful decision-to live a double lie, devoting herself to two different husbands in two different cities.

Satisfied with Nothin' by Ernest Hill

2008-07-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

Jamie Ray Griffin is among the first students to integrate his local high school in 1970s rural Louisiana15 years after court-imposed desegregation. Despite harassment, Jamie internalizes his anger much better than does his best friend, Booger, whose volatile temper leads to a riot on the first day of school. Jamie's athletic abilities earn him a starring role on the football team and the apparent respect of local residents. Yet when his cousin is caught dating a white girl, Jamie witnesses a brutal assault and lynching, which he vows never to forget.

In pursuit of a pro football career, he attends a local black university; while struggling to balance academics and increasing athletic demands, he falls in love with Stacy Lefere, an accomplished, upper-class black woman. His exploitive coaches drive others to quit, but Jamie, intent on a pro career, plays hard while his grades slide. When a crippling injury ends his chances to remain in college, Jamie is overlooked in the NFL draft and fails in a subsequent tryout as a free agent when his knee again collapses. Unable to accept Stacy's love, and with academic failureabetted by counselors who urge him to take "bowling" and "sports injuries"a near certainty, he returns to a low-paying job at home

Yellow Moon by Jewell Parker Rhodes

2008-07-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

A medicine woman with her feet in two worlds battles evil in present-day New Orleans. Marie Levant is "the right doctor for a weird death." She's an ER doctor at a charity hospital who shares a bloodline with legendary voodoo queen Marie Laveau. The reluctant voodooienne is fiercely protective of what's hers, including her toddler Marie-Claire and a pooch named Kind Dog.

But the single mother has needs, too, which she pursues unabashedly in the Big Easy's rhythmic jazz clubs. After she sees a musician possessed during a performance, she suspects something dark has invaded her city. Next she weighs in on a series of bizarre murders whose victims include a drummer, a dock worker and a prostitute with puncture marks; the three have been drained of all their blood. To unearth the truth behind the horrifying deaths, Marie agrees to help Daniel Parks, a dedicated but open-minded homicide detective who doesn't mind Levant's unusual methods if they help him catch a killer. "This world, the next," he declares. "Don't matter. Murder is still murder."

One in a Million by Kimberla Lawson Roby

2008-07-03T12:44:00.000-07:00

Kennedi Mason thinks she's the luckiest woman on earth. She loves her job, she has a wonderful best friend, and she's been married for ten years to her soul mate. There's nothing she can think of that could make her life any better.

Then one fateful day Kennedi receives a piece of news that will turn her world upside down. She's excited about it, and she knows that her husband, Blake, will be over the moon. He has always dreamed of this one thing happening, and she can't wait until he comes home so she can tell him.

But when she sees Blake that evening, he has a special announcement of his own. It shocks Kennedi into silence and wipes the admission she was planning to make right out of her mind. In an instant, her life and her marriage have changed, but not at all in the way that she had expected.

Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter

2008-06-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1952, twenty prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha’s Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. After literally stumbling on Castle's garroted corpse in a Harlem park, Eddie Wesley, a young and ambitious African-American writer, is afraid to identify himself to the police. An inverted cross bearing a cryptic inscription clutched in the victim's hand intrigues Wesley enough for him to pursue a trail that leads to a shadowy group of conspirators known as the Palace Council.

When Eddie’s younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a twenty-year search for the truth. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics, all the way to the Oval Office.

Map of Ireland by Stephanie Grant

2008-06-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

In 1974, when Ann Ahern begins her junior year of high school, South Boston is in crisis -- Catholic mothers are blockading buses to keep Black children from the public schools, and teenagers are raising havoc in the streets. Ann, an outsider in her own Irish-American community, is infatuated with her beautiful French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugénie, who hails from Paris but is of African descent. Spurred by her adoration for Eugénie, Ann embarks on a journey that leads her beyond South Boston, through the fringes of the Black Power movement, toward love, and ultimately to the truth about herself.

The Critic by Dyanne Davis

2008-06-02T12:28:00.000-07:00

Anyone can write a book. . . At least that's what literary critic and talk show host Jared Stone thinks. After all, how hard can it be to pen a romance novel? The women who churn those books are a bunch of empty headed, bored women, and the women that read that trash are even worse. It takes no skill to either write or read the dribble. To prove his point, he's willing to walk the walk by joining a local romance writer's chapter and cranking out a silly little novel.

Toreas Rose has spent years crafting her novel, sweating through revisions and weathering rejections with the best of them. When Jared challenges her by promising he can finish a novel in a couple of weeks, she graciously steps aside. When Jared and Toreas match wits in a contest of the literary critic vs. the romance writer, no holds are barred. As challenges, insults, and sparks fly between them things start to heat up. And quicker than you can crack the cover on a new book, the confrontation gets personal- so personal that they're creating a steamy subplot all their own. But will their ending be a literary tale of woe or a classic happily-ever-after?

Greenwood by Herbert McCann

2008-05-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

The unprecedented prosperity and creativity of the Roaring Twenties acts as a striking counterpoint to the poverty of a young Southwestern town, in this eloquent tale drawn from real sources of African American history. The hopeful residents of Greenwood, Oklahoma, are still suffering economically but plan to turn their lives around. Richard Rowland’s love for Sarah Page worries his father and offends the sensibilities of the people who hold the power of life and death over him.

L. J. McSpadden is the son of slaves who has overcome incredible odds to become a success and yet is the thorn in the side of men more powerful than he. And William Hogg is driven to build the greatest city in the Southwest. Many more men pass through town who help shape the economic and political standards of the time, but when their goals collide with the citizens of Greenwood, a conflagration ignites that terrifies some and excites others.

The End of Baseball by Peter Schilling Jr.

2008-05-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

Using actual events, Schilling has fictionalized a fantasy scenario in baseball history-the integration of black players into the major leagues in 1944. Bill Veeck Jr., a Marine veteran from a prestigious baseball family, buys the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, becoming the youngest man to ever own a major league club. Veeck is a genius at publicity and promotion who wants to win the World Series-but using black players. He signs the best of the Negro League to the Athletics, against all conventional feeling and the opposition of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the vicious commissioner of baseball.

The Athletics romp through the 1944 season behind the on-and-off diamond antics of real-life stars like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella, with Veeck struggling to raise money, avoid race riots and flummox Judge Landis. This exciting, fast-paced story is a fine commentary on baseball lore, race relations, and American sentiment during World War II, and it will have the reader hanging on every pitch, wondering how Veeck and his players will overcome racial discrimination to prove they can play in the major leagues.

Blood Colony by Tananarive Due

2008-05-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

There's a new drug on the street: Glow. Said to heal almost any illness, it is distributed by an Underground Railroad of drug peddlers. But what gives Glow its power? Its main ingredient is blood -- the blood of immortals. A small but powerful colony of immortals is distributing the blood, slowly wiping out the AIDS epidemic and other diseases around the world.

Meet Fana Wolde, seventeen years old, the only immortal born with the Living Blood. She can read minds, and her injuries heal immediately. When her best friend, a mortal, is imprisoned by Fana's family, Fana helps her escape -- and together they run away from Fana's protected home in Washington State to join the Underground Railroad. But Fana has more than her parents to worry about: Glow peddlers are being murdered by a violent, hundred-year-old sect with ties to the Vatican. Now, when Fana is most vulnerable, she is being hunted to fulfill an ancient blood prophecy that could lead to countless deaths.

Trading Dreams at Midnight by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

2008-05-12T13:16:00.000-07:00

Fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, are certain their mother will return, flush with the promise of a new man. But Freeda's disappearance on the cold February morning in 1984 soon stretches from days to months and from months to years. Raised by their stern grandmother Nan, the two sisters quickly learn to look after themselves, fiercely reinventing their lives in the wake of Freeda's absence.

Two decades later, at age thirty-six, Neena has moved away from Philadelphia and supports herself by blackmailing married men. When one of her stings goes terribly wrong, she decides to return to her childhood home. Unable to face her grandmother, Neena attempts to pull one last hustle on a prominent local lawyer. But when she learns that her younger sister has been hospitalized with pregnancy complications, she must decide how to come to terms with the woman who raised her. Reunited, Neena, Tish, and Nan each confronts her own memories of the past, and together reveal their dreams for the future.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

2008-05-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. Her slave mother has urged him to take her. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady," who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.

There are other voices: the native-American Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious persecution back in England; and young Sorrow, daughter of a sea captain, who’s spent too many years at sea to be quite...normal; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother.

The Soloist by Steve Lopez

2008-05-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

When Steve Lopez saw Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he found it impossible to walk away. More than thirty years earlier, Ayers had been a promising classical bass student at Juilliard—ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans—until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia. When Lopez finds him, Ayers is homeless, paranoid, and deeply troubled, but glimmers of that brilliance are still there.

Over time, Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers form a bond, and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers's life. Lopez collects donated violins, a cello, even a stand-up bass and a piano; he takes Ayers to Walt Disney Concert Hall and helps him move indoors. For each triumph, there is a crashing disappointment, yet neither man gives up. In the process of trying to save Ayers, Lopez finds that his own life is changing, and his sense of what one man can accomplish in the lives of others begins to expand in new ways

Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Harper Barnes

2008-05-05T13:27:00.001-07:00

In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. “There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it.

Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

2008-05-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

Redemption is in short supply in these five stories by a Nigerian priest about children caught in the crossfire of various African countries' upheavals. The opener of this debut collection, "An Ex-mas Feast," is one of the more upbeat entries-which isn't saying much, since its eight-year-old narrator describes sniffing shoe glue to ward off hunger in a Nairobi shanty town while his 12-year-old sister proudly moves from street prostitution to a brothel. In "Fattening for Gabon," a morbid variation on Hansel and Gretel, an uncle literally fattens up his nephew and niece to sell them into slavery. Although he genuinely loves them, his repentance comes too late and with not-unexpected tragic results. The least arresting story is the slight and familiar "What Language Is That?" Their families profess liberal, inclusive attitudes, but a Christian child and her Muslim best friend are prohibited from communicating when rioting breaks out in Addis Ababa, although the girls do find, perhaps briefly, "a new language."

That miniscule glimmer of hope for humanity disappears in "Luxurious Hearses," an emotionally exhausting encapsulation of the devastation caused by religion. Baptized as an infant by his Catholic father, raised in a strict Muslim community by his mother, adolescent Jubril is targeted by extremists who happen to be his former playmates. Fleeing religious riots in northern Nigeria on a luxury bus full of Christians, he keeps his right wrist in his pocket; if they see that his hand has been amputated (for stealing, under Sharia law), they will know he is Muslim. Jubril comes close to finding acceptance among his fellow passengers, which only makes their ultimate violence against him thatmuch more disturbing. The final story, "My Parents' Bedroom," goes beyond disturbing toward unbearable as the children of a Tutsi mother and Hutu father in Rwanda witness the unspeakable acts their decent parents are forced to commit.

Breach of Peace by Eric Etheridge

2008-05-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

In the spring and summer of 1961, several hundred Americans—blacks and whites, men and women—converged on Jackson, Mississippi, to challenge state segregation laws. The Freedom Riders, as they came to be known, were determined to open up the South to civil rights: it was illegal for bus and train stations to discriminate, but most did and were not interested in change. Over 300 people were arrested and convicted of the charge "breach of the peace."

The name, mug shot, and other personal details of each Freedom Rider arrested were duly recorded and saved by agents of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a Stasi-like investigative agency whose purpose was to "perform any and all acts deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi." How the Commission thought these details would actually protect the state is not clear, but what is clear, forty-six years later, is that by carefully recording names and preserving the mug shots, the Commission inadvertently created a testament to these heroes of the civil rights movement.

War of the Bloods in My Veins by Dashaun Jiwi Morris

2008-04-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

By turns harrowing, moving, and ultimately redemptive, this is a war story -- a war that rages out of control on the streets of the United States, claiming the lives of our loved ones and neighbors. In this memoir, complete with child soldiers, unspeakable violence, and eventual salvation, we witness the journey of an East Coast member of the notorious Bloods gang coming to terms with the lost boy he was and the transformation into the man he wants to become.

Unlike the child warriors of Mozambique and Sierra Leone, gang members and the wars they wage are the United States' homegrown nightmare. Lacking protection, support, or any alternatives, Dashaun Morris is forced into battle for the first time at age eleven, in the streets of Phoenix, when a friend's older brothers put him in a car filled with 40s and weed smoke, put a gun in his hands, then make him point it at the men on the corner and squeeze the trigger. The targets are Crips, of course, and, as Morris writes, "In the darkness of the streets, my childhood is murdered.... I am reborn -- a gangster."

Mudbound by Hillary Joran

2008-04-08T09:26:00.001-07:00

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm -- a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not -- charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South.

It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

The Tempest Tales by Walter Mosley

2008-04-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

Tempest Landry, a quick-witted African American resident of Harlem, NY, is walking home when a case of mistaken identity leads to his being shot by police. He finds himself standing in line at the gates of heaven waiting to talk to Saint Peter, who reviews his past transgressions and finds him wanting. Tempest is denied entry into heaven and ordered to hell. Believing his "sins" justified and heaven refusing to see the full truth, Tempest refuses to go and challenges Saint Peter to prove to him that he is a sinner. And so begins Tempest's return to Earth with a denizen of heaven, Joshua Angel, to convince Tempest of Saint Peter's edict. Of course, the devil wants Tempest's soul and is scheming to use Tempest to destroy heaven.

The Soiling of Old Glory by Louis P. Masur

2008-03-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

The photograph strikes us with visceral force, even years after the instant it captured. A white man, rage written on his face, lunges to spear a black man who is being held by another white. The assailant’s weapon is the American flag. Boston, April 5, 1976: As the city simmered with racial tension over forced school busing, newsman Stanley Forman hurried to City Hall to photograph that day’s protest, arriving just in time to snap the image that his editor would title “The Soiling of Old Glory.” The photo made headlines across the U.S. and won Forman his second Pulitzer Prize. It shocked Boston, and America: Racial strife had not only not ended with the 1960s, it was alive and well in the cradle of liberty.

Louis P. Masur’s evocative “biography of a photograph” unpacks this arresting image in a tour de force of historical writing. He examines the power of photography and the meaning of the flag, asking why this one picture had so much impact. Most poignantly, Masur recreates the moment and its aftermath, drawing on extensive interviews with Forman and the figures in the photo to reveal not just how the incident happened, but how it changed the lives of the men in it. The Soiling of Old Glory, like the photograph it is named for, offers a dramatic window onto the turbulence of the 1970s and race relations in America.

The Echo from Dealey Plaza by Abraham Bolden

2008-03-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

Abraham Bolden was a young African American Secret Service agent in Chicago when he was asked by John F. Kennedy himself to join the White House Secret Service detail. For Bolden, it was a dream come true—and an encouraging sign of the charismatic president’s vision for a new America. But the dream quickly turned sour when Bolden found himself regularly subjected to open hostility and blatant racism. He was taunted, mocked, and disparaged but remained strong, and he did not allow himself to become discouraged.

More of a concern was the White House team’s irresponsible approach to security. While on his tour of presidential duty, Bolden witnessed firsthand the White House agents’ long-rumored lax approach to their job. Drinking on duty, abandoning key posts—this was not a team that appeared to take their responsibility to protect the life of the president particularly seriously. Both prior to and following JFK’s assassination, Bolden sought to expose and address the inappropriate behavior and negligence of these agents, only to find himself the victim of a sinister conspiracy that resulted in his conviction and imprisonment on a trumped-up bribery charge.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

2008-03-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom—and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan, Aminata helps pen the Book of Negroes, a list of blacks rewarded for service to the king with safe passage to Nova Scotia. There Aminata finds a life of hardship and stinging prejudice.

When the British abolitionists come looking for "adventurers" to create a new colony in Sierra Leone, Aminata assists in moving 1,200 Nova Scotians to Africa and aiding the abolitionist cause by revealing the realities of slavery to the British public. This captivating story of one woman's remarkable experience spans six decades and three continents and brings to life a crucial chapter in world history.

Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard

2008-03-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

Whenever the phone rang at the home of Paul and Roy Deacon in the early morning hours, it often meant that someone had died. The family owned the Deacon Memorial Funeral Home and had buried the loved ones of Mobile, Alabama's black families for more than one hundred years. On the morning of March 21, 1981, the call was different: The body of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald had been found hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue. The murder shook the citizens of Mobile, especially the Deacon brothers. They had called Michael Donald a friend.

The brothers and their hometown have to face the ramifications of the first lynching in more than sixty years. Mobile had been as peaceful as its tree-lined streets were beautiful, but the murder gave the city its own sad chapter in Alabama racial history. Like Birmingham's four little girls, Selma's Bloody Sunday, and Tuskegee's experiment, Mobile had the murder of Michael Donald.

Song Yet Sung by James McBride

2008-02-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future: from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop-in her dreams.

Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America.

No Place Safe: A Family Memoir by Kim Reid

2008-02-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

Thirteen-year-old Kim Reid will never forget the summer of 1979. In those precious free moments when she is not taking care of her little sister while her single mother works as a cop, Kim's days are filled with thoughts of boys, makeup, and starting high school in the fall. When a heartbreaking discovery along a quiet Atlanta road makes the news, Kim's mother instructs her girls to be careful. Accustomed to her mother's warnings, Kim feels she already knows how to stay alert and carry herself as if she's not scared.

But as the shadow of danger lengthens over Kim's once-sunny landscape of friends and family, she learns there is no place safe. While her mother becomes preoccupied with her increasingly high-profile job, Kim feels life unraveling. Straddling the worlds of her black neighborhood and her wealthy white school, teetering on the brink between girl and woman, Kim is torn between fitting in and finding her own voice; between becoming strong and clinging to the last traces of her childhood.

Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones

2008-02-13T07:27:00.001-08:00

After her two brothers were "jumped in" by the Bloods at ages twelve and thirteen, Margaret--renamed Bree in her new street life--follwed their example. At twelve she was making deliveries for local drug dealers. For her thirteenth birthday, she received her own gun. At sixteen, forced to find a way to keep the water from being shut off in her foster home, she learned to cook crack cocaine. Soon after, she fell in love for the first time, dating a seasoned gang member until he was sentenced to life in prison. We observe the lives of these characters from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood. For some, this means following a trajectory of crime, pregnancy, imprisonment-and ultimately, death. But for Margaret, her obvious intelligence, will, and tenacity-aided by sheer luck-enable her to break free, to graduate from high school, and then college.

Conception by Kalisha Buckhanon

2008-02-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

Fifteen-year-old Shivana Montgomery believes all black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. When she accidentally becomes pregnant by an older man and must decide what to do, she begins a journey towards adulthood. Then she falls in love with Rasul, a teenager with problems of his own, and together they must fight to rise above their circumstances and move toward a more positive future. Conception is told through the narrative voice of Shivana's unborn child, which gives this story of a young woman's struggle through life a new and different depth.

Cadillac Orpheus by Solon Timothy Woodward

2007-11-13T08:08:00.000-08:00

While Jesmond, financially disadvantaged African-American repo worker from a hurrican alley Florida town, struggles with a troubled relationship with his father, his pator's gay son is implcated in the suicide death of his partner, and the woman Jesmond loves marries a threatening man.

Look for this book in February 2008.

Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History by Michael Klarman

2007-11-13T07:34:00.000-08:00

Michael J. Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, is one of the leading authorities on the history of civil rights law in the United States. In Unfinished Business, he illuminates the course of racial equality in America, revealing that we have made less progress than we like to think. Indeed, African Americans have had to fight for everything they have achieved.

They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race by James Davidson

2007-11-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

Recounts the first thiry years in the life of Ida B. Wells in an incisive portrait that sheds new light on how she defined her own aspirations and her people's freedom as an outspoken writer and lecturer against lynching.

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

2007-10-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-10-24T08:39:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-24T08:20:00.001-07:00

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.

All I Want is Everything by Daaimah S. Poole

2007-09-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

From the "Essence"] bestselling author of "Yo Yo Love" and "Got A Man" comes a powerful urban story of one womans determination to realize her dreams of stardom.

Reserve Your Copy

Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe

2007-09-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe

In this sensational new novel from the "New York Times" bestselling author of "God Dont Like Ugly" and "God Dont Play," a beautiful, resourceful woman engineers a high-stakes game of love, money, and sex--all in the name of a better future.

Reserve Your Copy

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

2007-09-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

Two months before he died of cancer, renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard called his grown son and daughter to his side, to reveal a secret he had kept all their lives and most of his own: he was black. His daughter Bliss learned that her WASPy, privileged Connecticut childhood had come at a price. Ever since his own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to "pass" in order to get work, Anatole had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary élite, he maintained the façade. Now Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity.

Reserve Your Copy

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson

2007-09-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow by Dedra Johnson

Set in 1970s-era New Orleans, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is the disturbingly powerful and uplifting story of a young African American girl named Sandrine, whose only refuge against a world of poverty, racial discrimination, and parental abuse are the letters she writes to her dead grandmother. In the tradition of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow is a brilliant debut from an important new voice in African American fiction. A professor of English at Dillard University, Dedra Johnson received her MFA from the University of Florida, where she was a finalist for the Hurst-Wright Award. Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow was a finalist for the 2006 William Wisdom Creative Writing Award.

Reserve Your Copy

The Amen Sisters by Angela Benson

2007-09-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Amen Sisters by Angela Benson

A Christy Award finalist offers a bold and gritty story about one of the most talked about issues in the church--religious leaders who sexually abuse members of their congregations--and how two women heal after betrayal.

Reserve Your Copy