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Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The story of John, a fourteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a Pentecostal minister in Harlem in 1935, as he struggles to discover his own identity.
"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families - the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A collection of stories about the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The Mothers meets An American Marriage in this dazzling debut novel about mothers and daughters, identity and family, and how the relationships that sustain you can also be the ones that consume you. The Butler family has had their share of trials. As sisters, Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest. But nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives. Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned...
Author
Language
English
Description
During WWII, two African American musicians are captured by the Nazis in Paris and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Bernice L. McFadden has been named the Go On Girl! Book Club's 2018 Author of the Year
WINNER of the 2017 American Book Award
WINNER of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction)
2017
...Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Read-Alikes for Malibu Rising
Read-Alikes for The Dutch House
Read-Alikes for The Yellow House
Staff Picks
Read-Alikes for The Dutch House
Read-Alikes for The Yellow House
Staff Picks
Description
"The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone--and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest...
10) The unsettled
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them...
11) Memphis: a novel
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
12) Red at the bone
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Two familes from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier,...
13) Mrs. Wiggins
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"The daughter of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, Maggie Franklin knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and church-going. Someone like Hubert Wiggins, the most eligible man in Lexington, Alabama--and the son of its most revered preacher. Proper and prosperous, Hubert is glad to finally have a wife, even one with Maggie's background. For Hubert has a secret he desperately needs to stay hidden. And Maggie's unexpected charm,...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
On his deathbed, a dying Black man writes a letter to his estranged, gay son and shares with him the truth that lives in his heart and tries to create a place where the pair can find peace.
As Jacob lies dying, he writes a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery. Secrets from Jacob's tumultuous...
16) Flipping boxcars
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Cedric The Entertainer's debut novel Flipping Boxcars is a valentine to close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. The story is also an homage to Cedric's grandfather, who in this tale emerges as Babe. He is a charismatic and widely loved man. He is also a gambler, whose gift of gab often gets him out of tricky situations, which is often. Babe is also a dreamer, something he shares in common with...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Best friends Annette and Rhoda find their lives in turmoil as Annette tries to balance her new found love life as she tries to reconcile with her husband Pee Wee and discovers a devastating secret while Rhoda must deal with her daughter Jade, whose antics lead Rhoda to throw her out of the house.
Author
Language
English
Description
The story is narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit. Forty years later, after the death of her husband, Tass returns to Money and fanstasy takes flesh when Emmett Till's spirit is finally released from the waters of the Tallahatchie River and the two lovers are reunited.--Publisher's...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Award Nominated Women Authors
Read-Alikes for Our Missing Hearts
Read-Alikes for Red at the Bone
More Lists...
Read-Alikes for Our Missing Hearts
Read-Alikes for Red at the Bone
More Lists...
Description
A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...
Author
Series
The book of shadow volume 1
Language
English
Description
"Meet the Kings, one of the most influential families in New York City. In the power circles of the movers and shakers, they are regarded as modern-day royalty. A politically connected father, a socialite mother, and three promising children: they look every bit the all-American family ... but every family has secrets. Some darker than others. Of all the children, Shadow is the least like the rest of the Kings. To call him soft wouldn't be quite accurate,...
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