"Young Lensinda Martin is a protegee of a crusading Black journalist and activist in mid-18th century southwestern Ontario, finding a home in a community founded by veterans of the War of 1812 and refugees from the slave-owning states of the American south--whose agents do not always stay on their side of the border. One night, a neighbouring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman recently arrived via...

Struggling to adjust to the upper-crust white suburb of Rolling Hills, Virginia, De'Andrea Whitman is challenged by her therapist to make a white girlfriend and finds one in Rebecca Myland as they are brought together to fight back against the community's rising racial sentiments. De'Andrea Whitman, her husband Malik, and their five-year-old daughter, Nina, are new to the upper-crust white suburb of Rolling Hills, Virginia--a move motivated by circumstance...

"This incendiary debut of linked stories narrates the everyday lives of Soweto residents, from the early years of apartheid to its dissolution and beyond"-- In a series of linked stories, Makhene narrates the everyday lives of Soweto residents. The stories range from the early years of apartheid to its dissolution and beyond, portraying the stories of everyday black folks processing the savagery of apartheid with grit, wit, and their own bewildering...

"Colleen is an Iraq-war-veteran-turned-Pitchlynn, Mississippi-homemaker, and she works hard to keep her deployment behind her -- until her pregnancy churns up trauma so acute it threatens her husband, her family, and herself. Magnifying her anxiety is the media frenzy surrounding the retrial of Colleen's father-in-law, Hare Hobbs, for a Civil Rights-era murder. As the trial draws nearer, the question of Hare's guilt grows to implicate the town of...

When his poor sharecropper father is killed in an accident and leaves the family in debt, twelve-year-old Little Charlie agrees to accompany fearsome plantation overseer Cap'n Buck north in pursuit of people who have stolen from him; Cap'n Buck tells Little Charlie that his father's debt will be cleared when the fugitives are captured, which seems like a good deal until Little Charlie comes face-to-face with the people he is chasing.

When a fourteen-year-old girl is the alleged victim of a terrible act of racial violence, the incident shocks and galvanizes her community, exacerbating the racial tension that has been simmering in this New Jersey town for decades. In this magisterial work of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates explores the uneasy fault lines in a racially troubled society. In such a tense, charged atmosphere, Oates reveals that there must always be a sacrifice--of innocence,...

From Jewell Parker Rhodes, the author of Towers Falling and Ninth Ward (a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a Today show Al's Book Club for Kids pick) comes a tale of a strong, spirited young girl who rises beyond her circumstances and inspires others to work toward a brighter future.
Ten-year-old Sugar lives on the River Road sugar plantation along the banks of the Mississippi. Slavery is over, but laboring in the fields...

Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

"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...

A complex portrait of a small town in Louisiana in 1943, as seen in the twelve hours before a black teenager's execution for the alleged rape of a white woman --