Interested in exploring African and African-American literature? Check out this list curated by a member of CCPL's staff
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CHARLESTON, S.C. - No one knows books and gives better recommendations than librarians. That's one of our favorite things to do, and we spend a lot of time researching and reading new books and old ones to keep our recommendations fresh.
With our branches closed to the public, having those conversations is a lot more difficult. But it's not impossible! And that's why CCPL's librarians have been digging through our digital resources to build list upon list of digital recommendations.
This book list was compiled by Gerald Moore, the branch manager at the Dorchester Road Library.
"I have tried to organize a myriad of stories from the very varied and intricate African-American experience while touching on sub genres within the African-American Fiction category. This is a list of what I consider classic literary works, contemporary voices writing serious literature, popular fiction authors, the urban/street lit authors and African-American authors writing in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres," Moore says of the list.
"I have also included a few African writers. The last section of this lengthy list is for 'new & noteworthy' African-American fiction works that I was presently surprised to see available for our patrons in e-book and audio book format from our digital collection."
This list is the deepest of deep dives into a wide-ranging world of literature. There are so many titles in this list, you could probably use it to get through this pandemic, and the next two or three! Fortunately, our guide on this list broke it up into easily digestible sections.
Let's dive in!
Classic African-American Literary Fiction
Bailey’s Café by Gloria Naylor
In post–World War II Brooklyn, on a quiet backstreet, there is a little place that draws people from all over-not for the food, and definitely not for the coffee. An in-between place that is only there when you need it, Bailey's Cafe is a crossroads where patrons stay for a while before making a choice: Move on or check out? In this novel, National Book Award–winning author Gloria Naylor's expertly crafted characters experience a journey full of beauty and heartbreak.
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women by Alice Walker
Though they come from wildly different backgrounds, the women in these stories all strive for liberation from painful realities. Here are stories of women traveling with the weight of broken dreams, with kids in tow, with doubt and regret, with memories of lost loves, with lovers who have their own hard pasts and hard edges. Some from the South, some from the North, some rich and some poor, the characters that inhabit In Love & Trouble all seek a measure of self-fulfillment, even as they struggle with difficult circumstances and limiting social conventions. The stories that make up Alice Walker's debut short fiction collection reflect her tenacious commitment to face brutal and sometimes melancholy truths while also illuminating the ways in which the courageous pursuit of love brings hope to even the most harrowing lives. This e-book features an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author's personal collection.
The Street by Ann Petry | Hoopla audiobook
THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
Selina's mother wants to stay in Brooklyn and earn enough money to buy a brownstone row house, but her father dreams only of returning to his island home. Torn between a romantic nostalgia for the past and a driving ambition for the future, Selina also faces the everyday burdens of poverty and racism. Written by and about an African-American woman, this coming-of-age story unfolds during the Depression and World War II. Its setting-a close-knit community of immigrants from Barbados-is drawn from the author's own experience, as are the lilting accents and vivid idioms of the characters' speech. Paule Marshall's 1959 novel was among the first to portray the inner life of a young female African-American, as well as depicting the cross-cultural conflict between West Indians and American blacks. It remains a vibrant, compelling tale of self-discovery.
A Long Day in November by Ernest J. Gaines
An affectionate and funny story set in the "black quarter" of a Southern sugar cane plantation in the 1940's and told by a child named Eddie, who watches his mother leave his father over his preoccupation with his car, which his father ultimately burns to the ground on the advice of a voodoo woman to get his wife back.
Passing by Nella Larsen
Restless Classics presents the ninetieth anniversary edition of an under sung gem of the Harlem Renaissance: Nella Larsen's Passing, a captivating and prescient exploration of identity, sexuality, self-invention, class, and race set amidst the pealing boisterousness of the Jazz Age.
When childhood friends Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry cross paths at a whites-only restaurant, it has been decades since they last met. Married to a bigoted white man who has no idea that she is African American, Clare has fully embraced her ability to "pass" as a white woman. Irene, also light-skinned and living in Harlem, is shocked by Clare's rejection of her heritage, though she too passes when it suits her needs. This encounter sparks an intense relationship between the two women who, as acclaimed critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney writes in his insightful introduction, reflect Larsen's own experience of being "between black and white, and culturally at home nowhere."
In a culture intent on setting boundaries, Clare and Irene refuse to adhere to expectations of gender, race, or class, culminating in a tragic clash of identities, as their relationship swings between emotional hostility and intense attraction.
Jubilee by Margaret Walker
Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South's antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction.
The Outsider by Richard Wright
Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself-a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. From Richard Wright, one of the most powerful acclaimed, and essential American authors of the twentieth century, comes a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. At once brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior.
Cane by Jean Toomer | Hoopla audiobook
First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer's impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is a classic of both American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and challenges the idea of race as a scientific or biological concept.
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston | Hoopla audiobook
Mules and Men is a treasury of black America's folklore as collected by a famous storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed an oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Returning to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, to gather material, Zora Neale Hurston recalls "a hilarious night with a pinch of everything social mixed with the storytelling." Set intimately within the social context of black life, the stories, "big old lies," songs, Vodou customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of African Americans.
Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
A shining star of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Langston Hughes is one of modern literature's most revered African-American authors. Although best known for his poetry, Hughes produced in Not Without Laughter a powerful and pioneering classic novel. This stirring coming-of-age tale unfolds in 1930s rural Kansas. A poignant portrait of African-American family life in the early twentieth century, it follows the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a man.
Contemporary African-American Voices
Glorious by Bernice McFadden | OverDrive ebook
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty. Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption. Bernice L. McFadden is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including the classic Sugar and Nowhere Is a Place, which was a Washington Post best fiction title for 2006. She is a two-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of two fiction honors from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA). McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is working on her next novel.
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy | OverDrive ebook | OverDrive audiobook
A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. 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. However, now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home and move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts-and shapes-their family's future. The Turner House brings us a colorful, complicated brood full of love and pride, sacrifice and unlikely inheritances. It is a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams and futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive ebook | OverDrive audiobook
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn's daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband's drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns; ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty, he will leave again. For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is a powerful new literary voice whose short stories and essays have already earned her an enthusiastic audience. In An Untamed State, she delivers an assured debut about a woman kidnapped for ransom, her captivity as her father refuses to pay and her husband fights for her release over thirteen days, and her struggle to come to terms with the ordeal in its aftermath. An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.
Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive ebook | OverDrive audiobook
The New York Times bestselling author of Wench returns to the Civil War era to explore the next chapter of history-the trauma of the War and the end of slavery-in this powerful story of love and healing about three people who struggle to overcome the pain of the past and define their own future. The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie, and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life. Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others' suffering, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. To mend herself and help those in need, she must return to Tennessee to face the women healers who rejected her as a child. Sadie can commune with the dead, but until she makes peace with her father, she, too, cannot fully engage her gift. Searching for his missing family, Hemp arrives in a northern city that shimmers with possibility. However, redemption cannot be possible until he is reunited with those taken from him.
The Last Thing You Surrender by Leonard Pitts, Jr. | Hoopla audiobook
Pulitzer-winning journalist and bestselling novelist (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s new historical page-turner is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States. An affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black mess man’s life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese. A young black woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war. A black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched, is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion.
Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith
Evi-a classically trained ballerina-was nine months pregnant when her husband Eamon was killed in the line of duty on a steamy morning in July. Now, it is winter, and Eamon's adopted brother Dalton has moved in to help her raise six-month-old Noah. Whiskey & Ribbons is told in three intertwining, melodic voices: Evi in present day, as she's snowed in with Dalton during a freak blizzard; Eamon before his murder, as he prepares for impending fatherhood and grapples with the danger of his profession; and Dalton, as he struggles to make sense of his life next to Eamon's, and as he decides to track down the biological father he's never known. In the vein of Jojo Moyes' After You, Whiskey & Ribbons explores the life that continues beyond loss, with a complicated brotherly dynamic reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys. It is a meditation on grief, hope, motherhood, and goodwill and surrogate fatherhood. Above all, it is a novel about what it means-and whether it is possible-to heal.
Only the Strong by Jabari Asim | Hoopla audiobook
Jabari Asim's debut novel returns readers to Gateway City, the fictional Midwestern city first explored in his acclaimed short story collection, Taste of Honey. Against a 1970's backdrop of rapid social and political change, Only the Strong portrays the challenges and rewards of love in a quintessential American community where heartbreak and violence are seldom far away. Moved by the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Lorenzo "Guts" Tolliver decides to abandon his career as a professional leg-breaker and pursue a life of quiet moments and generous helpings of banana pudding in the company of his new, sensuous lover. His erstwhile boss, local kingpin Ananias Goode, is also thinking about slowing down but his tempestuous affair with Dr. Artince's Noel, a prominent pediatrician, complicates his retirement plans. Meanwhile, Charlotte Divine, the doctor's headstrong protégée, struggles with trials of her own. With prose that is sharp, humorous, and poetic, Asim skillfully renders a compelling portrait of urban life in the wake of the last major civil-rights bill. Massive change is afoot in America, and these characters have front-row seats.
Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate
With Third Girl from the Left, Southgate brings her acute vision and emotional scope to a larger canvas. This enormously entertaining yet serious novel tells a story of African-American women struggling against all odds to express what lies deepest in their hearts. Like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, it ranges freely through time, fact, and fiction to weave an enthralling story about history and art and their place in the lives of three women. "My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them to change a life, to change her life." So explains Tamara, daughter of Angela, granddaughter of Mildred - the three women whose lives are portrayed in stunning detail in this ambitious novel spanning three generations of one family.
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones | OverDrive ebook | Hoopla audiobook
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and the 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. This is the third stunning novel from an author deemed one of the most important writers of her generation" (the Atlanta Journal Constitution).
John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James
The incredible debut novel from 2015 Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James! This stunning debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957 with language as taut as classic works by Cormac McCarthy and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison. Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1970. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, a New York Times Editors' Choice, was released in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim. Currently a professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he divides his time between Jamaica, New York City, and the Twin Cities.
October Suite by Maxine Clair
It is 1950 and October Brown is a twenty-three-year-old first-year teacher thanking her lucky stars that she found a room in the best boardinghouse for Negro women teachers in Wyandotte County, Kansas. October falls in love with an unhappily married handyman, James Wilson, but when she becomes pregnant, James deserts her. Stunned, and believing that James will eventually come back to her, October decides to have the baby.
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge | OverDrive ebook
The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family. Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute's history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.
The Wide Circumference of Love by Marita Golden | OverDrive ebook
From acclaimed author Marita Golden comes a moving African-American family drama of love and devotion in the face of Alzheimer’s disease. You just cannot plan for this kind of thing.
Diane Tate certainly has not. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. As a respected family court judge, she has spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband’s health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control.
As Gregory’s memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man he once was-and learn to love the man he has become. For Diane’ daughter Lauren, it means honoring her father by following in his footsteps as a successful architect. For her son Sean, it means finding a way to repair the strained relationship with his father before it is too late. Supporting her children in a changing landscape, Diane remains resolute in her goal to keep her family together-until her husband finds love with another resident of the facility. Suddenly faced with an uncertain future, Diane must choose a new path-and discover her own capacity for love. From acclaimed author Marita Golden comes a moving African-American family drama of love and devotion in the face of Alzheimer’s disease.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn | OverDrive audiobook
Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate.
Untwine by Edwidge Danticat
A haunting and mesmerizing story about sisterhood, family, love, and loss by literary luminary Edwidge Danticat. Giselle Boyer and her identical twin, Isabelle, are as close as sisters can be, even as their family seems to be unraveling. Then the Boyers are caught in a car crash that will shatter everyone's world forever.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They are completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home-a home that is silent and suffocating.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue | OverDrive audiobook
A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.
The Mothers by Brit Bennett | OverDrive audiobook
Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.
Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo | OverDrive audiobook
Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage—after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures—Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time—until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin's second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant. Which, finally, she does—but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead | OverDrive audiobook
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The unforgettable New York Times best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis | OverDrive audiobook
A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
African-American Popular Fiction
More to Life by ReShonda Tate Billingsley
Freshly forty-five, Aja James knows that her life is good, complete with a loving, wealthy husband, well-adjusted children, and a beautiful home. Yet the truth is, she feels painfully unfulfilled, stuck in the present, haunted by a painful past. When a friend suggests a girls' trip to a tropical paradise, Aja hopes a change of scene will also change her perspective.
On vacation, filled with fun and freedom, Aja is relieved to find her spirits lifting. However, her good time also shines a light on what is troubling her: from her siblings to her husband and kids, she has spent nearly her whole life taking care of everyone-except herself. She has lost her spark. She has lost her identity.
Desperate to turn things around, Aja makes an impulsive decision-one that outrages her family and stuns her friends. However, it may also be her wisest choice. Because it is only through learning, what she could lose-and what is truly worth keeping-that Aja can transform this temporary fix into real, lasting happiness.
Midlife Crisis by La Jill Hunt
Sylvia Blackwell has it all, or so she thinks. She and her handsome husband, Garrett, are the epitome of success: an immaculate house of their dreams, a beautiful and talented 17-year-old daughter, flourishing careers, and nearly twenty years of perfectly wedded bliss. Just as they are making plans for their vow renewal celebration, a call in the middle of the night interrupts their picture-perfect lives. Now Sylvia has to deal with the reality of Garrett's dead mistress, a love child she never knew about, and the fact that the man she has been married to for the past twenty years may not be the man she knows at all.
Unlike her sister Sylvia, when it comes to love, Janelle Hudson can take it or leave it. Her on again, off again, noncommittal, stress-free friendship with Jarvis Baldwin is fine with her. However, her life becomes complicated when she is faced with choosing between a sure thing with a good man and what feels right with the wrong one.
Bestselling author LaJill Hunt is back with Midlife Crisis, an emotion-packed story of love, betrayal, and family loyalty. When lies are unveiled and secrets are revealed, can love be strong enough to forgive, even when you cannot forget?
Sister Surrogate by Lachelle Weaver | Hoopla audiobook
Three sisters and a baby equal family drama... Bridgette, Ivy and Savannah have always been close, and as with any sisterhood, it has not been without its challenges, but they always manage to come together in times of need. When the youngest, Savannah is faced with a life altering illness which threatens her lifelong desire to have children, one of her sisters offer to give her the ultimate gift--to become her surrogate.
The Other Side by Trice Hickman | Hoopla audiobook
After one too many failed relationships, businessperson Bernadette Gibson is resigned to singlehood. Yet on the heels of her fiftieth birthday, she meets Cooper "Coop" Dennis, a charismatic nightclub owner who literally sweeps her off her feet. However, just as they are ready to make the ultimate commitment, a secret from Coop's past threatens to end their relationship. As her fortieth birthday approaches, bestselling novelist Testimony "Tess" Sinclair is hurting-especially since her ex-boyfriend got married. For a change of scenery, she travels to the sleepy southern town of Bourbon, NC, to visit her cousin, Bernadette-and finds unexpected love. Yet as wedding bells promise to ring, Tess wrestles with a secret that could end their happily ever after before it begins.
Up-and-coming makeup artist and single mom Arizona May is thrilled to be just a few months away from marrying the love of her life. Until then, she and her fiancé are committed to celibacy. However, on the eve of Arizona's thirtieth birthday, they surrender to passion-and she discovers something about her Prince Charming that leads her to rethink their plans. As Bernadette, Tess, and Arizona strive to find happiness, they develop a bond that strengthens and surprises them-and carries them through their struggles, to the other side.
LUST by Victoria Christopher Murray (Part 1 of the Seven Deadly Sins series)
From the NAACP Image award winner and national bestselling author Victoria Christopher Murray, a novel inspired by the seven deadly sins about a woman caught between an entertainment mogul with a shady past and his childhood friend who is out for revenge. Is lust a sin? Tiffanie has lived a sheltered life in a very strict household with her pastor grandfather and her grandmother in Washington, D.C. However, when she meets Damon, she falls for the successful entertainment businessperson despite his history as a drug dealer. Everyone sees a bright future for the couple-yet when Tiffanie meets Trey, her lustful feelings leave her confused just days before her wedding. Trey is Damon's childhood best friend with whom he built a successful drug business. However, when the game got hot and Damon decided to leave, Trey stayed and continued to sell drugs until he was arrested and spent seven years in prison. Now he is out and able to attend the wedding. While Damon is thrilled to have Trey back and hopes to bring his best friend into his business, Trey has other plans. In addition, in the end, there will only be one man standing . . . Contains mature themes.
ENVY by Victoria Christopher Murray (Part 2 of the Seven Deadly Sins series)
A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.
Gabrielle Wilson has the perfect life: a Beverly Hills mansion, a loving family, and a massively successful PR firm. When her father admits that an affair he had years before resulted in a daughter, Gabrielle is shocked, but is actually happy. Could this be the sister she has been praying for all her life?
Keisha Jones's life is a struggle. Her late mother worked on the streets, and school was its own nightmare. When Gabrielle offers to fly Keisha out of Arkansas to meet the family, Keisha instantly agrees. However, Gabrielle doesn't realize that Keisha has known about the Wilsons for years. Keisha is determined to have everything she has always envied, and nothing can stand in her way. Contains mature themes.
The Other Woman by Eric Jerome Dickey
Eric Jerome Dickey strides boldly over the minefield that is modern marriage. The central couple's biggest challenge is timing: He works days; she works nights. Instead of growing together, they are rapidly drifting apart, coexisting on stolen phone calls from work, punctuated by occasional bedroom encounters that leave them both feeling even emptier and more alone. When she finds out about his affair-and starts her own-, the delicate fabric of their marriage is torn irrevocably asunder. Alternatively, is it?
In Dickey's expert hands, what begins as a seemingly unforgivable betrayal segues into the sexy and searing story of a man and a woman at a pivotal turning point in their relationship. Only time will tell whether they will let it all go . . . or if they can hold on to the love that drew them together in the first place.
Getting It Right by Karen E. Obsorne
Getting It Right is the story of Kara and Alex, half-sisters who have never met--one the product of an abusive foster-care setting, the other of dysfunctional privilege. Haunted by crippling memories, Kara falls for the wrong men, tries to help her foster-care siblings suffering from PTSD, and longs for the father and half-sister she only knows from a photograph. Alex, meanwhile, struggles to keep her younger sisters out of trouble, her mother sane, and her marketing business afloat. Now Alex has a new responsibility: from his hospital bed, her father tasks her with finding Kara, the mixed-race child he abandoned. Alex is stunned to learn of Kara's existence but reluctantly agrees. To make things more complicated, Kara loves a married man whom the FBI is pursuing for insider trading. When Alex eventually finds her half-sister, she becomes embroiled in Kara's dangers, which threaten to drag them both down. If Kara does not help the FBI, she could face prosecution and possible incarceration, and if Alex cannot persuade Kara to meet their father, she will let him down during the final days of his life. Set in Harlem, the Bronx, and the wealthy community of Bedford, New York, during two weeks in March, Getting It Right explores grit and resilience, evolving definitions of race and family, and the ultimate power of redemption and forgiveness.
The Perfect Find by Tia Williams
Will a forty-year-old woman with everything on the line – her high-stakes career, ticking biological clock, bank account – risk it all for an intensely lusty secret romance with the one person who could destroy her comeback, for good?
Jenna Jones, former It-girl fashion editor, is broke and desperate for a second chance. When she has dumped by her longtime fiancé and fired from Darling magazine, she begs for a job from her old arch nemesis, Darcy Vale. The beyond-bitchy publisher of StyleZine.com, Darcy agrees to hire her rival – only because her fashion site needs a jolt from Jenna's old school cred. However, Jenna soon realizes she is in over her head. She is working with digital-savvy millennials half her age, has never even "Twittered," and pretends to still be a Fashion Somebody while living a style lie (she sold her designer wardrobe to afford her sketched-out studio, and now quietly wears Walmart's finest). Worse? The twenty-two-year-old videographer assigned to shoot her web series is driving her crazy. Wildly sexy with a smile Jenna feels in her thighs, Eric Combs is very off-limits – but almost too delicious too resist.
Soulmates Dissipate Series Books 1, ,2, 8 by Mary B. Morrison 7
Fashion photographer Jada Diamond Tanner may have her pick of fine men, but no one has captured her heart like gorgeous financial advisor Wellington Jones. From their first embrace, Jada knows he is the soulmate she has waited for.
But while the love she shares with Wellington is exhilarating, Jada faces challenges she never imagined-from a beautiful rival, hungry for love, and from Wellington's overbearing socialite mother, who believes Jada will never fit into her circle. Forced to make difficult choices, Jada learns painful lessons about trust and commitment…and discovers the courage to celebrate each day, with or without the man she loves.
Soulmates Dissipate Series Book 3: He’s Just a Friend by Mary B. Morriso
Fancy Taylor wants to settle down. Moreover, after dating twenty-six men in fifty-two weeks, she knows all too well that married men are bad news. Unfortunately, irresistible Byron Van Lee--who has a big car, big income, big ego, and big you-know-what--neglects to mention his wife and kids until after Fancy falls for him big time.
Soulmates Dissipate Series Book 4 : Somebody’s Gotta Be on Top by Mary B. Morrison
In Mary B. Morrison's national bestsellers Never Again Once More and He's Just a Friend, readers met playboy heir Darius Jones and reckless-in-love Fancy Taylor. Now, in this achingly poignant, deliciously sensual erotic novel, she takes Darius's relationships further and explores the ways men and women surrender themselves in order to gain the love they are desperately seeking.
Soulmates Dissipate Series Book 5: Nothing Has Ever Felt Like This by Mary B. Morrison
In bestselling author Mary B. Morrison's steamiest novel yet, the timing finally seems to be right for Darius Jones and Fancy Taylor--but what they discover about one another may surprise them.
I Almost Forgot About You by Terry McMillan | OverDrive audiobook
In I Almost Forgot About You, Dr. Georgia Young's wonderful life—great friends, family, and successful career—aren't enough to keep her from feeling stuck and restless. When she decides to make some major changes in her life, including quitting her job as an optometrist and moving house, she finds herself on a wild journey that may or may not include a second chance at love.
Who Asked You? by Terry McMillan | OverDrive audiobook
When Who Asked You? begins, 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 the while holding down a job delivering room service at a hotel. 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 of two lively grandsons is the last thing BJ thinks she needs. But who asked her?
African-American Urban Fiction Series
The Family Business by Carl Weber | OverDrive ebook
By day, the Duncans are an upstanding family who run a thriving car dealership in Queens. By night, they live a dangerous secret life! Carl Weber and Eric Pete deliver a thrilling underworld drama in The Family Business.
L.C. Duncan, patriarch of the family, is at the age when he's starting to think about retirement in sunny Florida. But the recession is taking a bite out of the business and, worrying more, he has to decide which of his children should take over. When his workaholic son Orlando gets the nod, Orlando's siblings—including the favorite son Vegas, conniving daughter London, glamorous party girl Paris and flamboyant nightclub owner Rio—are up in arms. But so are the Zunigas, a rival family whose fragile business alliance with the Duncans may explode at any moment.
When Vegas suddenly breaks away from the family, London's lawyer husband, Harris, makes a play for the company and all hell breaks loose. Selling cars, it turns out, is only a small part of the Duncans' family business. Each member of the family has a secret expertise to reveal. And now, under siege from the Mafia, Mexican drug cartels and the Zunigas, the Duncans will have to stick together—or die separately!
The Family Business 2 by Carl Weber | OverDrive ebook
Welcome to the world of Duncans. By day they are upstanding citizens running one of New York's most respected car dealerships;but by night, they're criminals who control most of the East Coast drug traffic. No matter whether they're on their day or night jobs, one thing is true about the Duncans: there is never a dull moment to be found. Baby momma drama takes over the Duncan clan, as there is still uncertainty about who has fathered the Duncan sisters' new babies. Meanwhile, Orlando Duncan, the family's new CEO and a man with his own baby momma problems, has just developed a new product that may make the millionaire Duncans into billionaires. Orlando only has one obstacle in front of him, and it's not law enforcement or one of his family's many rivals. It's his mother, and she may be his most formidable opponent to date, because she's making the family take sides. Can a civil war within the Duncan family be averted before it tears them apart?
The Family Business 3 by Carl Weber | OverDrive ebook
Vegas Duncan's release from prison is right on time for his older brother Junior's engagement to the voluptuous Sonya Brown. Unfortunately, Junior's attempt at happiness comes to a screeching halt when Sonya's husband, the mysterious Brother X, and his army of Muslim hit men declares war on the Duncan clan.
Duncan family patriarch LC Duncan has gone up against many foes in his time and has always come out on top; however, he's never gone up against a religious fanatic like Brother X, who cares little about money and everything about principle. LC does have one card up his sleeve to shut down X. The question is, will he wake up from his gunshot-induced coma before it's too late?
What could be worse than fighting a war while your father's in a coma? How about two brothers and a brother-in-law undermining each other in a battle for their father's seat at a multimillion-dollar table?
Once again the Duncan family is wrapped up in the drama, intrigue, and nonstop action that fans have come to expect from this powerful series.
The Family Business 4 by Carl Weber | OverDrive ebook
LC Duncan, patriarch and leader of the Duncan clan, is alive and well after being shot by a mysterious gunman. His near death experience has caused him and his wife Chippy to reflect on both the past and present, and together they decide that it's time to return to Waycross, Georgia for a long overdue family reunion.
Wherever the Duncans go, trouble is never too far behind, and this time it comes in the form of longtime Duncan enemy Vinnie Dash and Orlando Duncan's baby momma, Ruby. Vinnie and Ruby are back to seek revenge on the Duncan family, and they continue to deny Orlando the opportunity to meet his only child, who has been named after his family's sworn enemy. Orlando takes things into his own hands and sets out to Jamaica to get his son.
The beautiful Paris Duncan is being haunted by recurring nightmares of her true love, Niles Monroe. She blew up his private plane when he became a threat to her family; however, there have been signs that suggest he may still be alive. On top of this, Darryl Graham, a long lost family friend, has returned and reignited a feud between Paris and London. Will the sisters have it out once again over the attention of a man?
Get ready for another roller coaster ride with the Duncan family.
The Cartel Series – Deluxe Edition – Books 1-3 by Ashley Coleman & JaQuavis
The port of Miami brings in millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine every year, and the Cartel controls eighty percent of it. The Diamond family is a force to be reckoned with, but all hell breaks loose when they lose their leader. The most ruthless gangster Miami has ever seen, Carter Diamond, leaves behind a wife, twin sons, a daughter, and a secret. The secret is his illegitimate son, Carter Jones. When young Carter learns of his father’s death, he comes to town and is introduced to the legacy of the Cartel.
Miamor is a woman who uses her beauty to enhance her skill as a contract killer. She is the leader of The Murder Mamas. When her crew is hired to take down the Cartel, they get caught slipping, and Miamor loses her sister in the process. She is determined to get revenge. Unknowingly, she meets the son of Carter Diamond, and he immediately catches her heart. She is sleeping with the enemy, and when she finds out, she is torn between love and revenge.
Thus begins the saga of the Cartel, the New York Times bestselling series by street lit superstars Ashley & Jaquavis. Every book in the series is full of their trademark fast-paced drama, deceit, and plot twists that will leave you shocked. Now fans can relive the story of the Diamond family in this deluxe edition, with books one through three all under one cover.
The Cartel Series, Part 2 – Deluxe Edition – Books 4-5 by Ashley Coleman & JaQuavis
The Diamond family has survived murder, deceit, and betrayal. Through it all, they're still standing tall, and a new era has begun. After a failed attempt on her life, Breeze has moved into the queen's position by Zyir's side. Zyir has taken over the empire and locked down Miami's streets. He has the world in his palms, but there is always new blood ready to overthrow the throne.
Young Carter has retired and moved away from the madness--that is, until he gets an unexpected visitor at his home. This person shakes up the whole family, causing chaos that threatens to bring down the Cartel for good.
When a Boeing 747 drops out of the sky with the men of The Cartel aboard, the women of the family have to step into their own. With the federal government on their heels and the family on the brink of destruction, a female dynasty is born.
After the government's case is thwarted, the ladies plan to take the family legit. They head west to establish a new endeavor, but with new territory comes new problems. The Carter family name doesn't ring as loud as it did in Miami. It's a new set of gangsters, a new set of rules, as the Cartel finds problems with an Arabic millionaire. Even as the new Cartel struggles to go legit, trouble always finds a way into the family's circle. Larceny, deceit, and murder are all in the cards.
The Banks Sisters by Nikki Turner
The Banks Sisters 2 by Nikki Turner
The Banks Sisters 3 by Nikki Turner
New York Times bestselling author Nikki Turner returns with her most spellbinding story to date: Meet the Banks sisters-Simone, Bunny, Tallhya, and Ginger. The four beauties are living under the same roof by force, but they cannot stand each other. Their only common denominator is their loving grandmother, Me-Ma. When she is not at work trying to make ends meet, she's home with her girls, trying to keep them from killing each other.
Tragedy strikes when Me-Ma has a heart attack at church. The sisters are shocked to discover that Me-Ma left the house and all her money to the church. Now the pastor wants them out, unless they can come up with the money to buy the house from him. To make matters worse, Bunny already owes over a hundred thousand dollars to a very dangerous man.
How can four broke women, each with their own mountain of problems, come up with enough money to save the family's home-and save Bunny's life? They devise a plan that could have them rolling in plenty of dough-as long as they can stay one step ahead of the law enforcement that's on the lookout for a group of bank robbers who have burst onto the scene.
Black Girl Lost by Donald Goines
Sandra took to the streets when she was eight years old and tried to fight off the hunger pangs by shoplifting and moving into the profits of drug pushing. Then she met Chink, and with him, she discovered love and affection, along with rape and murder.
Whoreson by Donald Goines
From one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century comes the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today's street lit and hip-hop culture.
Whoreson Jones is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john. As a child, he's looked after by his neighborhood's imposing matriarch, Big Mama, while his mother works. At age twelve, his street education begins when a man named Fast Black schools him in trickology. By thirteen, Whoreson is a cardsharp. By sixteen, his childhood abruptly ends, and he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless, battling to understand and live up to his mother's words: "First be a man, then be a pimp."
Dopefiend by Donald Goines
The shocking nightmare story of a black heroin addict. Trapped in the festering sore of a major American ghetto, a young man and his girlfriend-both attractive, talented, and full of promise-are inexorably pulled into the living death of the hardcore junkie. It is a horrifying world where addicts will do anything to get their next fix. For twenty-three years of his young life, Donald Goines lived in the dark, despair-ridden world of the junkie. It started while he was doing military service in Korea and ended with his murder in his late thirties. He had worked up to a hundred-dollars-a-day habit-and out of the agonizing hell came Dopefiend.
African-American SciFi, Fantasy, Horror, and Afro-Futurism
Octavia Butler – Earthseed Series
Parable of the Sower
In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren's father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren's family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
As America rebuilds itself, bigotry threatens a peaceful haven. Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group's walls, America is changing for the worse. Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret wins national fame by preaching a return to the values of the American golden age. To his marauding followers, who are identified by their crosses and black robes, this is a call to arms to end religious tolerance and racial equality, a brutal doctrine they enforce by machine gun. And as this band of violent extremists sets its deadly sights on Earthseed, Acorn is plunged into a harrowing fight for its very survival. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
Octavia Butler – Patternists Series
Wild Seed
When two immortals meet in the long-ago past, the destiny of mankind is changed forever. For a thousand years, Doro has cultivated a small African village, carefully breeding its people in search of seemingly unattainable perfection. He survives through the centuries by stealing the bodies of others, a technique he has so thoroughly mastered that nothing on Earth can kill him. But when a gang of New World slavers destroys his village, ruining his grand experiment, Doro is forced to go west and begin anew. He meets Anyanwu, a centuries-old woman whose means of immortality are as kind as his are cruel. She is a shapeshifter, capable of healing with a kiss, and she recognizes Doro as a tyrant. Though many humans have tried to kill them, these two demi-gods have never before met a rival. Now they begin a struggle that will last centuries and permanently alter the nature of humanity. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
A young woman discovers she has tremendous psychic power. The baby's name is Mary, and her father is immortal. For thousands of years he has orchestrated a selective breeding project, attempting to create a master race capable of controlling others through thought. Most of his attempts have resulted in volatile mutations, but Mary, whom he has raised in the rough part of a Southern California town, is the closest he has come to perfection. If he doesn't handle her carefully, this greatest experiment will be his last. As Mary comes of age, she begins to grow aware of her psychic powers. And when she learns of her father's plans for her, she refuses to acquiesce. She challenges him to a psychic war, battling to free her people and set a new course for mankind. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
In a frightening near future, an alien disease is poised to become a devastating global epidemic, unless someone can stop it. Blake Maslin and his two daughters are driving to Flagstaff when bandits swarm their car. At gunpoint, the marauders kidnap one of Blake's children, promising to keep her safe in return for medical care. Warily, the doctor goes with them, not realizing that he has just taken the first step down a terrifying path that will consume his life. The gunmen take him deep into the desert, to a colony of people infected with a gruesome alien disease. It causes weakness, sallow skin, and birth defects so horrible that the children who suffer them cannot rightly be called human. The victims have quarantined themselves in the desert lest their illness spread and doom mankind. But as their willingness to accept isolation falters, Blake becomes the last hope for the survival of an uncontaminated Earth. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
A despot's heirs battle for control of all the minds on Earth. A psychic net hangs across the world, and only the Patternists can control it. They use their telepathic powers to enslave lesser life forms, to do battle with the diseased, half-human creatures who rage outside their walls, and, sometimes, to fight amongst themselves. Ruling them all is the Patternmaster, a man of such psychic strength that he can influence the thoughts of all those around him. But he cannot stop death, and when he is gone, chaos will reign. The Patternmaster has hundreds of children, but only one of them, Coransee, has ambition to match his father's. To seize the throne, he will have to co-opt or kill every one of his siblings, and he will not shy from the task. But when one brother takes refuge among the savages, a battle ensues that will change the destiny of every being on the planet. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
Octavia Butler – Xenogenesis Series
Dawn
Rescued from Earth's destruction, one woman is called upon to revive mankind. Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth, the last stage of the planet's final war. Hundreds of years later, Lilith awakes, deep in the hold of a massive alien spacecraft piloted by the Oankali, who arrived just in time to save humanity from extinction. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. Now it is time for Lilith to lead them back to her home world, but life among the Oankali on the newly resettled planet will be nothing like it was before. The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations, whether their new hosts like it or not. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet's untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
As humans and Oankali struggle to live together, the future of both species rests in the hands of Lilith's hybrid son. Nuclear war had nearly destroyed mankind when the Oankali came to the rescue, saving humanity, but at a price. The Oankali survive by mixing their DNA with that of other species, and now on Earth they have permitted no child to be born without an Oankali parent. The first true hybrid is a boy named Akin, son of Lilith Iyapo, and to the naked eye he looks human, for now. He is born with extraordinary sensory powers, understanding speech at birth, speaking in sentences at two months old, and soon developing the ability to see at the molecular level. More powerful than any human or Oankali, he will be the architect of both races' intergalactic future. But before he can carry this new species into the stars, Akin must decide which unlucky souls will stay behind. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler, including rare images from the author's estate.
Lilith’s Brood: The Complete Xenogenesis Trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago)
The newest stage in human evolution begins in outer space. Survivors of a cataclysmic nuclear war awake to find themselves being studied by the Oankali, tentacle-covered galactic travelers whose benevolent appearance hides their surprising plan for the future of mankind. The Oankali arrive not just to save humanity, but to bond with it—crossbreeding to form a hybrid species that can survive in the place of its human forebears, who were so intent on self-destruction. Some people resist, forming pocket communities of purebred rebellion, but many realize they have no choice. The human species inevitably expands into something stranger, stronger, and undeniably alien.
From Hugo and Nebula award–winning author Octavia Butler, Lilith's Brood is both a thrilling, epic adventure of man's struggle to survive after Earth's destruction, and a provocative meditation on what it means to be human.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author's estate.
Nnedi Okorafor – Binti Series
Binti (part one of the Binti Series) | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive audiobook
Home (part two of the Binti Series) | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive audiobook
The Night Masquerade (part three of the Binti Series) | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive audiobook
Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.
Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach.
If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself — but first she has to make it there, alive.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon | Hoopla audiobook
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She is used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she would be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the low deck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot--if she is willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson | Hoopla audiobook
Winner of the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection: A beguiling compendium of fifteen stories. In, Skin Folk, with works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling horror, Nalo Hopkinson is at her award-winning best spinning tales like "Precious," in which the narrator spews valuable coins and gems from her mouth whenever she attempts to talk or sing. In "A Habit of Waste," a self-conscious woman undergoes elective surgery to alter her appearance; days later, she is shocked to see her former body climbing onto a public bus. In "The Glass Bottle Trick," the young protagonist ignores her intuition regarding her new husband's superstitions-to horrifying consequences.
The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson | Hoopla audiobook
Nalo Hopkinson's third novel invokes the goddess of love in the name of redemption. Hopkinson's time-traveling, genre-spanning novel weaves a common thread of spiritualism and hope through three intertwined stories of women possessed by Ezili, the goddess of love, as she inspires, inhabits, and guides them through trying personal and historical moments. Jeanne Duval is a talented entertainer suffering from the ravages of a sexually transmitted disease; Mer is a slave and talented doctor who bears witness as Saint Domingue throws off the yoke of colonial rule in the early nineteenth century; and Meritet is a woman of the night who finds religion her own way. Though the three are separated by many miles and centuries, a powerful bond draws them together.
The Between by Tananarive Due
When Hilton was just a boy, his grandmother sacrificed her life to save him from drowning. Thirty years later, he begins to suspect that he was never meant to survive that accident and those dark forces are working to rectify that mistake.
My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
Nana by Brandon Massey
Monica Stephens never knew her birth mother. Raised by a strict but loving adoptive parent, she blossomed into a woman with a thriving career as a pediatrician and a family of her own. However, sometimes, she wondered about her origins. Especially her biological mother. Until Grace arrives.
Confessing to be the birth mother Monica had long wanted to meet, Grace quickly becomes an indispensable member of the Stephens household. Cooking their meals. Looking after the children. Comforting Monica when the family dog is inexplicably killed. Tending to Monica as she falls ill to a mysterious sickness that, every day, makes Monica look and feel older.
Meanwhile, Grace is looking better. More vibrant. More youthful. More seductive. Monica's husband, Troy, knows something is up. He launches an investigation into the woman who demands to be called 'Nana,' and has taken over his home. However, the truth is beyond their wildest imaginings. It seems Grace has done this before . . .
The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle | Hoopla audiobook
Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He is not mentally ill, but that does not seem to matter. On his first night, he is visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It is no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back.
Forty Acres: A Thriller by Dwayne Alexander Smith
A novel of rage and compassion, good and evil, trust and betrayal, Forty Acres is the thought-provoking story of one man's desperate attempt to escape the clutches of a terrifying new moral order.
New and Noteworthy African-American Fiction
Patsy by Nicole Dennis – Benn | Hoopla audiobook
When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it comes after years of yearning to leave Pennyfield, the beautiful but impoverished Jamaican town where she was raised. More than anything, Patsy wishes to be reunited with her oldest friend, Cicely, whose letters arrive from New York steeped in the promise of a happier life and the possible rekindling of their young love. But Patsy's plans don't include her overzealous, evangelical mother—or even her five-year-old daughter, Tru.
Beating with the pulse of a long-witheld confession, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to choose herself first—not to give a better life to her family back home. Patsy leaves Tru behind in a defiant act of self-preservation, hoping for a new start where she can be, and love, whomever she wants. But when Patsy arrives in Brooklyn, America is not as Cicely's treasured letters described; to survive as an undocumented immigrant, she is forced to work as a bathroom attendant and nanny. Meanwhile, Tru builds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica, grappling with her own questions of identity and sexuality, and trying desperately to empathize with her mother's decision.
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson | Hoopla audiobook | OverDrive ebook | OverDrive audiobook
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.
Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn't. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
Like Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child.
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, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony— a celebration that ultimately never took place.
Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.
The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | OverDrive ebook
Following her National Book Award-nominated debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton returns with this equally elegant and historically inspired story of survivors and healers, of black women and their black sons, set in the American South
In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family.
Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays her grandchild to be her companion. But Martha's behavior soon becomes erratic, then even threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine's converge.
The Revisioners explores the depths of women's relationships-powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between a mother and a child, the dangers that upend those bonds. At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom.
Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker
A TSA agent who has never flown, a girl braving new worlds to play piano, a teacher caught up in a mayoral race. In this debut collection of stories, each of them navigate life's "training school"-with its lessons on gentrification and respectability-while fighting to create a vibrant sense of self in this love letter to Washington, DC.
Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous-from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids' backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide-while others are devastatingly poignant-a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with black culture. Thompson-Spires fearlessly shines a light on the simmering tensions and precariousness of black citizenship. Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body. Boldly resisting categorization and easy answers, Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an original and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.
The World Doesn’t Require You by Rion Amilcar Scott
The World Doesn't Require You announces the arrival of a generational talent, as Rion Amilcar Scott shatters rigid genre lines to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love-all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism.
Established by the leaders of the country's only successful slave revolt in the mid-nineteenth century, Cross River still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. In lyrical prose and singular dialect, a saga beats forward that echoes the fables carried down for generations-like the screecher birds who swoop down for their periodic sacrifice, and the water women who lure men to wet deaths.
Among its residents-wildly spanning decades, perspectives, and species-are David Sherman, a struggling musician who just happens to be God's last son; Tyrone, a ruthless PhD candidate, whose dissertation about a childhood game ignites mayhem in the neighboring, once-segregated town of Port Yooga; and Jim, an all-too-obedient robot who serves his Master. As the book builds to its finish with Special Topics in Loneliness Studies, a fully-realized novella, two unhinged professors grapple with hugely different ambitions, and the listener comes to appreciate the intricacy of the world Scott has created-one where fantasy and reality are eternally at war.
The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines | OverDrive audiobook
Ernest J. Gaines's new novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young
reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order.
After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims—an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (The Dark Star Trilogy, Book 1) | OverDrive audiobook
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.
As Tracker follows the boy's scent—from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers—he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams | OverDrive audiobook
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places...including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, "What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?"—all of the questions today's woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
With "fresh and honest" (Jojo Moyes) prose, Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today's world.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead | OverDrive audiobook
As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.
The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.
Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
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.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories by Zora Neale Hurston | Hoopla audiobook
From one of the greatest writers of our time-the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God-a collection of remarkable stories, including eight "lost" Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. In May 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston-the sole black student at the college-was living in New York, "desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world." During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston's "lost" Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston's world. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer's voice and her contributions to America's literary traditions.
The Travelers by Regina Porter
With piercing humor, exacting dialogue, and a beautiful sense of place, Regina Porter's debut is both an intimate family portrait and a sweeping exploration of what it means to be American today.
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