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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,...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
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
Description
When white silver screen icon Kitty Karr Tate dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the three Black St. John sisters, it prompts questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty's affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty's journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could-and between a cheating fiancé and fallout from a controversial...
Author
Description
In a racially diverse Los Angeles neighborhood, Trinetta leaves her two young sons with her mother, Betty Jean, and promptly disappears. BJ, already has her hands full dealing with her other adult children, two opinionated sisters, an ill husband, and her own postponed dreams--all while holding down a job as a hotel maid. Her son Dexter is about to be paroled from prison; Quentin, the family success, can't be bothered to lend a hand; and taking care...
Author
Series
Description
McMillan revisits Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin fifteen years later. Each is at her own midlife crossroads: Savannah has awakened to the fact that she's made too many concessions in her marriage, and decides to face life single again-at fifty-one. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle, been swindled by her husband number two, and conned herself into thinking that a few pills will help distract her from her pain. Robin has...
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Caleb Franklin and his big brother, Bobby Gene, have the whole summer to explore the woods in Sutton, Indiana. Caleb longs to venture beyond their small town, but his dad likes the family to stay close to home. Then Caleb and Bobby meet their new neighbor Styx Malone. Styx is sixteen, and he oozes cool. He promises the boys that together, they can pull off the Great Escalator Trade - a way to turn one small thing into more, and more until they achieve...
Author
Description
The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives. In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting us with some three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions. From the town's founder,...
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It is the story - set in post-Civil War Ohio - of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad; a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who call herself Beloved....
Author
Description
"If you could choose your family ... you wouldn't choose the Penningtons. Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn't really know them. Five people who don't have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad's gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about. She's thirty, and her life isn't really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer...
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Description
"The paths of three young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia unexpectedly--and dangerously--collide in this dramatic debut novel inspired by the explosive history of a city at war with itself. Philadelphia, 1837. When nineteen-year-old Charlotte escaped from the deteriorating White Oaks plantation four years ago, she'd expected freedom to look completely different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. Instead, she's locked away playing...
Author
Series
Description
Meet Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean...Earl's All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed "the Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life's storms together for the next four decades. Through marriage, children, happiness, and the blues, these strong, funny women gather each Sunday at the same table at Earl's diner for delicious food, juicy gossip, and occasional tears....
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Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...
Author
Description
"It's 2008, and the rise of Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He's eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to, and abandoned, when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she'd never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past. Returning...
Author
Description
Meet James Samuel Vincent - an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish American background but hews to his father's philandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia's mother - Agnes Miller Christie - is a beautiful African American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life...
15) Witness: stories
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Appears on list
Description
In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters--from children to grandmothers to ghosts--live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action.
Author
Description
"Alexis Fletcher hasn't had a merry Christmas since losing her mother. Every December she remembers the joy her mother brought to everyone during the holiday season, and wishes her family could be whole again. And even as Alexis prepares to start a new family with her fiance, Chase Dupont, outside forces threaten to destroy her potential happiness. But fate has one more surprise in store for Alexis, and it might be exactly what she needs to finally...
Author
Series
Description
Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all...
Author
Description
After eight years, Sara Lancaster is returning to her hometown, Savannah, to take care of her ailing father. Along with her is her daughter, whose father assaulted Sara and is now in prison. Sara thinks she can avoid his family, including his twin brother Jacob who had also left town. However, Jacob has returned and when their two worlds collide, they are drawn together in unexpected ways.
Author
Description
Lone wolf J.J. Ferguson returns to economically depressed Pinewood, N.C., after 15 years to woo Ava, his high school crush, and build a hilltop mansion for all to envy. But the reunion is not what he bargained for. Ava, now married to Henry, a handsome but chronically miserable man with another family on the side, is a bored bank teller, at her wits? end trying to get pregnant after three miscarriages (and searching for solace on mommies2b.com). Meanwhile...
20) The first ladies
Author
Description
The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist and an educator, and as her reputation grows she becomes a celebrity, revered by titans of business and recognized by U.S. Presidents. Eleanor Roosevelt herself is awestruck and eager to make her acquaintance. Initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women's rights and...