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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
Author
Language
English
Description
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
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English
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Description
Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little...
6) Brown
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
In this loving ode to the color brown, a boy describes the many beautiful hues of his family.
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
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Description
"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...
Author
Pub. Date
[2011]
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
Award-winning novelist Martha Southgate (who, in the words of Julia Glass, "can write fat and hot, then lush and tender, then just plain truthful and burning with heart") now tells the story of a family pushed to its limits by addiction over the course of two generations.
Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Mothers meets An American Marriage in this dazzling debut novel about mothers and daughters, identity and family, and how the relationships that sustain you can also be the ones that consume you. The Butler family has had their share of trials. As sisters, Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest. But nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives. Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned...
Author
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Black History Month 2023 Adults
Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
MCL - Oprah's Book Club
Black Voices | Adults PEQ
JEF - Black Voices for Black History (Adult)
MCL - Oprah's Book Club
Formats
Description
To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.
The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. From an early age,...
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Language
English
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"A father's sudden disappearance exposes the private fears, dreams, longings, and joys of a Black American family in the late decades of the twentieth century, in this page-turning and intimate new novel from the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. It's a warm, bright October afternoon, and Ozro Armstead walks out into the brilliant sunshine on his thirty-seventh birthday. At home, his wife Deborah and daughter Trinity prepare...
13) The piano lesson
Author
Language
English
Description
August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences . In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...
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English
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Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
Author
Language
English
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Description
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...
16) Trinity: a novel
Author
Pub. Date
[2023]
Edition
First edition.
Language
English
Description
"Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, "Lord Jesus, if that ain't the blackest little baby born this side of heaven." Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors' promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather, who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi's red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"In this big-hearted debut about ambition, race, and class, a family grapples with how much of their lineage they're willing to unearth in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program. Almost a decade ago, Willie Revel gave up her burgeoning journalism career in New York to help run her father's struggling construction company in Philadelphia. An ambitious single mother, Willie has reluctantly put family first without being...
Author
Language
English
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Description
"In her first new book in seven years, Tananarive Due further cements her status as a leading innovator in Black horror and Afrofuturism American Book Award-winning author Tananarive Due's second collection of stories ranges from horror to science fiction to suspense. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due's stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart...
20) Clean getaway
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"For the life of him, William "Scoob" Lamar can't seem to stay out of trouble--and now the run-ins at school have led to lockdown at home. So when G'ma, Scoob's favorite person on Earth, asks him to go on an impromptu road trip, he's in the RV faster than he can say FREEDOM. With G'ma's old maps and a strange pamphlet called the 'Travelers' Green Book' at their side, the pair takes off on a journey down G'ma's memory lane. But adventure quickly turns...
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