In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet.

"Cassandra Williams is twelve, and her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, an accident happens and Wayne is lost forever. Or so it seems. Though his body is never recovered, their mother, unable to give up hope, launches an organization dedicated to missing children. Their father simply leaves, starts another family somewhere else. As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in coffee shops, airplane aisles,...

Hoffman offers a fictional 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. A young wounded Civil War soldier is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet falls in love with a blind man, and a mysterious traveler comes to town in the...

When the dead body of a young woman is found on the grounds of Belle Vie, the estate's manager, Caren Gray, launches her own investigation into Belle Vie's history, which leads her to a centuries old mystery involving the plantation's slave quarters--and her own past.

When an African American family with three children moves into her white neighborhood, eleven-year-old Winnie learns the difference between being a good neighbor and being a good friend.

"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...

Former reporter Serena "Rena" Manchester has transitioned into her new career as a private detective. The Clayton Matthews Law firm sends a few investigations her way that pay the bills, though the work is hardly exciting. However, a shift occurs one day while she is taking photos of a prominent businessman, Edwin Peters, with his young mistress. When the woman shows up dead, Serena has no doubt that Edwin Peters is the prime suspect.

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"A gritty, voice-driven thriller about a former getaway driver who thought he had escaped the criminal life who is pulled back in by race, poverty, and his own former life of crime. Beauregard "Bug" Montage is a man with many different titles: husband, father, friend, honest car mechanic. But before he gave it up, Bug used to be known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best Wheel Man on the East Coast. After a series...

Gayl Jones's special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped. -John Alfred Avant, The New Republic
Gayl Jones's first novel, Corregidora, won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping, subtle, and sure. It was praised, along with her second novel, Eva's Man, by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike, Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The publication...

Duval County, home to the Jacksonville Florida Jaguars, taught Tyree Morris many lessons through loss. She'd lost her mother at a young age, her father years later, and she even almost lost herself in heartbreak. But now, at twenty-one years old, life is on the upswing. Tyree hit the jackpot with superstar wide receiver, Kamaal Duval. They were instantly smitten with each other from the first time they met. And after two years of dating, Tyree

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