Life for Easy Rawlins is surprisingly... easy. He's living off the proceeds of his last case, trying to keep out of trouble. Of course it's not going to last. Because Easy's old friend Mouse knocks on his door. Mouse is one of the deadliest men in America. And Mouse wants a small favour. He wants Easy to help a man he says is wrongly imprisoned, a friend of Charcoal Joe. Charcoal Joe is a mythical figure in the LA underworld - he pulls all the strings...

"Octavia Estelle Butler dreamed of the stars, and Ibi Zoboi uses prose and poetry to give us what she terms a "biographical constellation" of a Black woman writing science fiction when it was very much still a white boy's club. Though written for children, the biography offers much for adults familiar with Butler's work may appreciate, from the titles of the sections ("Parable of the Sower," "Parable of the Talents") to lines in the poems referencing...

"When general Aaliyah returns to her city triumphant, she expects to find the people of Titus prospering under the rule of her Queen and lover, the beautiful stone mage Odessa. Instead, she finds a troubling imbalance in both the citizens' wellbeing and Odessa's rule. Aaliyah must now rely on all her allies, old and new, to do right by the city that made her."--Page 4 of cover.

Philadelphia 1793. Hercules, President George Washington's chef, is a fixture on the Philadelphia scene. He is famous for both his culinary prowess and for ruling his kitchen like a commanding general. He has his run of the city and earns twice the salary of an average American workingman. He wears beautiful clothes and attends the theater. But while valued by the Washingtons for his prowess in the kitchen and rewarded far over and above even white...

"Already excerpted in the New Yorker, Black Cloud Rising is a compelling and important historical novel that takes us back to an extraordinary moment when enslaved men and women were shedding their bonds and embracing freedom By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but...

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

Everyone in the Ellis family is excellent, except Ed the dog, who is determined to find something at which he, too, can excel.

Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors...

History was made in 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the professional baseball race barrier to become the first African American MLB player of the modern era. 42 tells the life story of Robinson and his history-making signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers under the guidance of team executive Branch Rickey.

"A timely and penetrating mystery about the intersection of policing, racism, and the community--set in a city at its boiling point--from an author who's been in the trenches and seen it all. A senseless act of violence. During a vigil calling for police reform, students from Spelman College, a historically black women's institution, are assaulted by rifle fire from a passing vehicle. On her way to interview witnesses, Detective Sarah "Salt" Alt confronts...