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Highlighting Black Authors
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Reel
by Kennedy Ryan
Neevah Saint, an understudy who unexpectedly lands a major role in a Harlem Renaissance biopic directed by renowned filmmaker Canon Holt, navigates newfound fame, forbidden attraction, and scandal, risking everything for her shot at stardom and love.
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The Fallen Fruit
by Shawntelle Madison
Combining history and fantasy, a sweeping multi-generational epic follows a woman who travels through time to end a family curse that has plagued her ancestors for generations.
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Second Tide's the Charm
by Blumberg, Chandra
Spending the summer on a shark research boat, which is owned by her ex-boyfriend, a shark expert who has risen to internet fame, marine biologist Hope Evans finds herself in uncharted waters when they, navigating past hurts, decide to chart a new course.
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Colored Television
by Danzy Senna
A dark comedy looks at second acts, creative appropriation and the racial identity–industrial complex
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Sky Full of Elephants
by Cebo Campbell
In a world where all the White people suddenly disappear, Charlie Brunton meets his 19-year-old biracial daughter for the first time and together they embark on a journey across a truly“post-racial” America in search for answers, but neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.
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Someone Like Us
by Dinaw Mengestu
With his marriage on the verge of collapse, journalist Mamush returns to his close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community in Washington, D.C., where a death in the family leads him on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask.
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Looking for Love in all the Haunted Places
by Claire Kann
With a special affinity for the supernatural, Lucky, conning her way onto a show investigating the haunted Hennessee House to kickstart her career, forms an instant connection with Maverick, but when their relationship meets a challenge—the house itself—she realizes that if she wants it all, she will have to risk everything.
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Masquerade
by O. O. Sangoyomi
Chosen to be the wife of a great warrior king, Òdòdó', a young Yorùbá woman, after a lifetime of subjugation, soars to the very heights of society where power and political savvy is too enticing to resist, but as tensions grow and betrayal runs rampar, she must defy her cruel husband even though she risks losing everything, including her life.
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It's Elementary
by Elise Bryant
A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.
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God bless you, Otis Spunkmeyer
by Joseph Earl Thomas
An ex-Army grad student, Joseph, navigates PTSD, single fatherhood and strained family ties while confronting the complexities of race, love, and justice in modern Philadelphia, in the new novel by the author of Sink.
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The secret keeper of Main Street
by Trisha R. Thomas
In 1954 Mendol, Oklahoma, a Black dressmaker with the gift of “second sight,” Bailey Dowery, when she touches the hand of bride-to-be Elsa, she's horrified by what she sees, and against her better judgment, helps Elsa, which puts her at the center of a murder investigation that threatens everyone she loves.
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This great hemisphere
by Mateo Askaripour
When authorities claim her brother, who was presumed dead, is alive—and the main suspect in the murder of the Chief Executive of Northwestern Hemisphere—Candace, a young invisible woman, must find him before it's too late in a world where no one and nothing is ever as it seems.
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What you leave behind
by Wanda M. Morris
Returning to her childhood home in Georgia, Deena Wood, when a landowner fighting to keep his family's land, dating back to the Civil War, disappears, and his property is quickly put up for sale, exposes a deadly scheme of illegal land grabs and property redevelopment that threatens her community and family.
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Pardon my Frenchie
by Farrah Rochon
Managing her successful doggie daycare, taking care of her teen twin sisters and blowing up on social media, Ashanti, when the world's worst dog hater shows up, finds everything she's worked for hanging in the balance and must make nice with the infuriating man, learning a few new tricks about falling in love.
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One of us Knows : a thriller
by Alyssa Cole
A resident caretaker of a historic home, Kenetria, diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, finds their newfound life disrupted by a group of strangers, including the man who destroyed her life, and when he turns up dead, they must prove their innocence or risking losing their future—and their life.
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Acts of forgiveness : a novel
by Maura Cheeks
A single mother is surprised when her family blocks her from uncovering her family's ancestry, past and secrets while trying to prove she was descended from slaves in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program.
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Ella : a novel
by Diane Richards
Follows the life of legendary singer Ella Fitzgerald from her escape from an infamous training school/prison that forced her to dance on the street for money to her 1934 first amateur appearance at the Apollo Theatre.
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Summer on Highland Beach : a novel
by Sunny Hostin
In Highland Beach, the oldest Black resort community in America, Olivia Jones, amid tense family drama, must decide if she wants to return to the beautiful life she's created in Sag Harbor or finally achieve her dream of having a home and family of her own in Highland Beach.
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Swift River
by Essie Chambers
In 1987, the only Black person in all Swift River after her Pop disappeared seven years ago, Diamond Newberry, receiving a letter from a relative she's never met, is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, gaining a sense of her place in the world and in her family.
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James : a novel
by Percival Everett
Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.
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The thing about home : a novel by Rhonda McKnightWhen an embarrassing viral video costs her millions of followers and her seven-year marriage ends, former model-turned-social media influencer Casey Black escapes to South Carolina's Lowcountry where she finds love, family and a place to call home—if she's brave enough to leave her old life behind.
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River sing me home
by Eleanor Shearer
In 1834 Barbados, after the master of the Providence plantation in Barbados refuses to let them go even though the king has decreed an end to slavery, Rachel escapes and embarks on a grueling, dangerous journey to find her five children who survived at birth and were sold.
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Black girls must have it all
by Jayne Allen
After a whirlwind year, Tabitha Walker's check list has changed drastically. Her picture perfect plan for the perfect job, husband, and home has now become: diapers changed (infinite), showers taken (zero), tears cried (buckets), and hours of sleep (what's that?). Don't get her wrong, Tabby loves her new bundle of joy and motherhood is perhaps the only thing that's consistent for her these days. When the news station announces that they will be hiring outside competitors for the new anchor position, Tabby throws herself into her work. But It's not just her role as a weekend anchor that Tabby has to worry about maintaining--all of her relationships seem to be spiraling out of their regular orbits. And when Marc presents her with an ultimatum, and his mother comes for an extended "visit", Tabby is forced to take stock of her life and make a plan for the future. As the demands of motherhood accumulate, the alienation from her friends and family deepens, and Tabby must figure out how to ask for the support she so desperately needs. But help is always there when you ask for it, and Tabby's village of friends and family will once again rally around her for her biggest challenge yet.
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Ramadan Ramsey
by Louis Edwards
When Ramadan Ramsey, the son of a ninth generation New Orleans African American and a Syrian refugee, turns 17, he sets off to find the father he has never known—an adventure-filled journey filled that takes him from NOLA to Egypt, Istanbul and finally Syria.
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The Sweetness of Water
by Nathan Harris
In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys. Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.
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The Man who Lived Underground
by Richard Wright
Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from the precinct and takes up residence in the sewers below the streets of Chicago.
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Lakewood
by Megan Giddings
Forced to drop out of school to help support her family, Lena takes a lucrative job as a secret laboratory subject before devastating side effects make her question how much she can sacrifice.
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The Prophets
by Robert Jones
Two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation find refuge in each other while transforming a quiet shed into a haven for their fellow slaves, before an enslaved preacher declares their bond sinful.
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The Missing American
by Kwei Quartey
Turning private detective when her ambition to be a police officer is dashed, Emma Djan teams up with a first client to search for a man whose disappearance is linked to the email scams and fetish priests of Ghana.
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When No One is Watching
by Alyssa Cole
Finding unexpected support from a new friend while collecting stories from her rapidly vanishing Brooklyn community, Sydney uncovers sinister truths about a regional gentrification project and why her neighbors are moving away.
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The furrows : an elegy : a novel
by Namwali Serpell
Haunted by the accidental death of her little brother Wayne years ago, Cassandra Williams begins seeing her brother everywhere and meets a man both mysterious and familiar who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the worldhis name is Wayne.
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Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
by Laura Warrell
When he discovers free-spirited drummer Maggie, the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, is pregnant by him, 40-year-old trumpet player and old-school ladies man who refuses to be tied down, Circus Palmer flees, setting off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life.
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On the Rooftop
by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
The talk of the Jazz-Era Fillmore, The Salvations sisters Ruth, Esther and Chloe find their personal ambitions on a collision course with those of their mother, whose dreams of musical stardom for them forces her to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter.
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Afterlives
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
A young man returns home years after being kidnapped to find his parents gone and his sister basically a slave in a multi-generational saga set during the colonization of east Africa that won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Perish
by LaToya Watkins
This sweeping family saga about a Black Texan family, which spans decades and is told in alternate chapters, follows four members of the Turner clan as they, called home to say goodbye to their mother and grandmother, must decide who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
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Last Summer on State Street
by Toya Wolfe
In the summer of 1999, Felicia Fe Fe Stevens, when she welcomes the mysterious Tonya into her group of friends, finds her life upended as the neighborhood falls down around them, forever changing the community, their families and their ability to trust each other.
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Friday Black
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A raw debut story collection from a young writer is a treacherously surreal, and, at times, heartbreakingly satirical look at what it’s like to be young and black in America.
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Black Boy Smile
by D. Watkins
At nine-years-old, D. Watkins has three concerns in life: picking his dad's lotto numbers, keeping his Nikes free of creases, and being a man. Directly in his periphery is east Baltimore, a poverty-stricken city battling the height of a crack epidemic just hours from the nation's capital. Watkins, like many boys around him, is thrust out of childhood and into a world where manhood means surviving by slinging crack on street corners and finding himself on the wrong side of pistols. For thirty years, Watkins is forced safeguard every moment of joy he experiences, or risk losing himself entirely. Now, for the first time, Watkins harnesses these moments to tell the story of how he matured into the D. Watkins we know today-beloved author, college professor, editor-at-large of Salon.com, and devoted husband and father.
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Speaking of Summer
by Kalisha Buckhanon
A woman's desperate search for her missing twin is complicated by their mother's recent death, police indifference, her relationship with her twin's boyfriend and a growing obsession that tests the limits of her sanity.
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Don't Cry For Me
by Daniel Black
On his deathbed, a dying black man writes a letter to his estranged, gay son and shares with him the truth that lives in his heart and tries to create a place where the pair can find peace
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When We Were Birds
by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
In Trinidad, Yejide, who has the power to guide the city’s souls into the afterlife, and Darwin, a grave digger going against his mother’s wishes never to interact with the dead, meet at an ancient cemetery where fate beckons them both.
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Wahala
by Nikki May
When charismatic Isobel explodes into their close-knit group, at first seemingly bringing out the best in each woman, Boo, Simi and Ronke, three Anglo-Nigerian best friends, find their close friendship starting to crack as this lethally glamorous woman wreaks havoc on their lives.
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Yonder
by Jabari Asim
Meeting at Placid Hall, a plantation in an unspecified part of the American South, Cato and Willian, subjected to the whims of their tyrannical and eccentric captor, find their friendship fraying when a visiting pastor fills their heads with ideas about independence and love.
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Yinka, Where is Your Huzband?
by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn
A 30-something, Oxford-educated, British Nigerian woman with a high-paying job and good friends, Yinka, whose aunties frequently pray for her delivery from singledom, must find a date for her cousin’s wedding with the help of a spreadsheet and her best friend.
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The Violin Conspiracy
by Brendan Slocumb
When, right before the cutthroat Tchaikovsky Competition – the Olympics of classical music, his priceless Stradivarius is stolen, with a ransom note for five million dollars in its place, Ray McMillian must piece together the clues to reclaim the violin before it’s too late.
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What the Fireflies Knew
by Kai Harris
Told from the perspective of almost 11-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), this coming-of-age novel follows KB as she is sent to live with her estranged grandfather where she, as everything and everyone changes around her, is forced to carve out a different identity for herself and find her own voice.
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The Last Suspicious Holdout
by Ladee Hubbard
The critically acclaimed author of The Rib King and The Talented Ribkins returns with an eagerly anticipated collection of short stories including the title story written exclusively for this volume, that explore relationships in a black neighborhood from 1992 to 2007.
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Down the River unto the Sea
by Walter Mosley
Framed by corrupt enemies within the NYPD and forced to serve a decade in prison, private detective Joe King Oliver receives a confession from a woman who helped set him up, a situation that compels him to investigate his own case at the same time he assists a black radical journalist who has been wrongly accused of murdering two corrupt cops.
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As the Wicked Watch
by Tamron Hall
After moving from Texas to Chicago, a crime reporter becomes frustrated with the lack of coverage of a series of murders of black women in the first novel of a new series from the Emmy Award-winning journalist.
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All Her Little Secrets
by Wanda M. Morris
The lone black female corporate attorney in midtown Manhattan discovers her white boss, and lover, dead with a gunshot wound to his head, and must deal with office suspicions and gossip when she is promoted as his successor.
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Harlem Shuffle
by Colson Whitehead
A furniture salesman in 1960s Harlem becomes a fence for shady cops, local gangsters and low-life pornographers after his cousin involves him in a failed heist.
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Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
by Wole Soyinka
Duyole Pitan-Payne realizes that someone is trying to stop him from assuming a prestigious job in the United Nations after discovering that a wily entrepreneur is stealing body parts from a Nigerian hospital for use in rituals.
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An American Marriage
by Tayari Jones
When her new husband is arrested and imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned.
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Razorblade Tears
by S. A. Cosby
When his son Isiah and his white husband, Derek, are murdered, ex-con Ike Randolph bands together with Derek’s father, another ex-con, to rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys while confronting their own prejudices about each other and their own sons.
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Walking on Cowrie Shells
by Nana Nkweti
In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti's virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures.
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The Other Black Girl
by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books, 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel is hired until she after a string uncomfortable events, is elevated to Office Darling, leaving Nella in the dust.
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Seven Days in June
by Tia Williams
Running into reclusive author Shane Hall at a literary event, bestselling erotica writer Eva Mercy, over the next seven days, reconnects with this man who broke her heart 20 years earlier until he disappears again, leaving more questions than answers.
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Caul Baby
by Morgan Jerkins
A fiction debut by the author of Wandering in Strange Lands finds a would-be mother rendered the unexpected caregiver of a niece’s unplanned baby, who a matriarch predicts will restore their family’s prosperity.
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Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes.
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The Confessions of Frannie Langton
by Sara Collins
A servant and former slave enduring a sensational trial for her employers' murders reflects on her Jamaican childhood and her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist whose questionable ethics set the stage for a forbidden affair.
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This Close to Okay
by Leesa Cross-Smith
A recently divorced therapist spots a man standing on the edge of a bridge and convinces him to join her for coffee instead of jumping and the pair spend a cathartic weekend sharing secrets and angsts.
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Remote Control
by Nnedi Okorafor
When an alien artifact turns her into Death’s adopted daughter, Sankofa, with her name being the only tie to her family and her past, searches for answers as cities fall in her wake.
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Binti
by Nnedi Okorafor
Collected for the first time in omnibus form, a trilogy by a Hugo-, Nebula- and World Fantasy Award-winning author follows Binti, a young Himba girl, who, while journeying to the elite Oomza University, must survive when her ship is attacked. Includes a new Binti story.
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Bad Men and Wicked Women
by Eric Jerome Dickey
When his pregnant and bitter daughter blackmails him for $50,000, Los Angeles enforcer Ken Swift embarks on a clash of wills that is complicated by a contract that spirals out of control, revealing the vengeful nature of a dangerous adversary.
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Speaking of Summer
by Kalisha Buckhanon
A woman's desperate search for her missing twin is complicated by their mother's recent death, police indifference, her relationship with her twin's boyfriend and a growing obsession that tests the limits of her sanity.
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
After Cora, a pre-Civil War Georgia slave, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South.
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The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
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The Girl with the Louding Voice
by Abi Daré
Adunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who longs for an education, must find a way for her voice to be heard loud and clear in a world where she and other girls like her are taught to believe, through words and deeds, that they are nothing.
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The Travelers
by Regina Porter
A first novel by an award-winning playwright follows the experiences of two American families, one black and one white, against a backdrop of historical events from the 1950s through the first year of Barack Obama's presidency.
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Well-Read Black Girl: Finding our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
by Glory Edim
The founder of the popular online book club curates a collection of original essays from today's best black female voices, including Jesmyn Ward, Lynn Nottage, Jacqueline Woodson, Gabourey Sidibe, Morgan Jerkins, Tayari Jones and Rebecca Walker.
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Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
Keeping his head down at a lakeside Midwestern university where the culture is in sharp contrast to his Alabama upbringing, an introverted African-American biochem student endures unexpected encounters that bring his orientation and defenses into question.
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Everything Inside: Stories
by Edwidge Danticat
A single-volume collection of short stories by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Brother, I’m Dying is set in such locales as Miami, Port-au-Prince and the Caribbean and poignantly explores the forces that unite and divide.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf
by Marlon James
Hired to find a mysterious boy who disappeared three years before, Tracker joins a search party that is quickly targeted deadly creatures in the first novel of a new trilogy from the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings.
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What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons
Raised in America, the multiracial daughter of a mother from Johannesburg struggles with her mother's terminal cancer and her own need to find love and a place to belong, quests shaped by losses, changes in her sense of identity and unexpected motherhood.
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by differing ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland fifteen years later.
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Five-Carat Soul
by James McBride
The National Book Award-winning author presents a never-before-published collection of stories that are funny and poignant, insightful and unpredictable and imaginative and authentic, and explore the ways we learn from the world and the people around us.
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Finding Gideon
by Eric Jerome Dickey
Calling in support from the beautiful Hawks when his latest job takes an unprecedented toll, jet-setting contract killer Gideon launches a plan to take down his nemesis, Midnight, who has assembled a team of mercenaries targeting Gideon's loved ones.
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Longwood Public Library800 Middle Country RoadMiddle Island, New York 11953 (631) 924-6400
longwoodlibrary.org |
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