A New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick-the unique and deeply moving saga of four generations of African-American women whose journey from slavery to freedom begins on a Creole plantation in Louisiana.Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned by a Creole family, Lalita Tademy chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women as they battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own ...

April 13, 1873. What happened that day in the small Southern town of Colfax, Louisiana, was called “the Colfax Riot.” But it was something far more devastating…Weaving together history and the story of her own family, Lalita Tademy, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Cane River, has written an epic work of fiction: the dramatic, intertwining story of two families struggling to survive and thrive in an America deeply divided after the Civil War....

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. A stunning debut novel, Wench marks author Perkins-Valdez—previ...

Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to her family's farm on Nagawaukee Lake, ...

In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill -- a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of...

Published in 1861, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiographical account of the author's experiences as a slave in nineteenth-century North Carolina, from her relatively happy childhood to the brutality she experienced as a teenager and young woman to her eventual escape to the North. One of the few slave narratives written by a woman, Jacobs's work deals frankly with the horrors of slavery, shedding light on the abuses female slaves in particular o...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn estranged mother and daughter reunite to confront their family’s role in World War II in this harrowing, unforgettable novel about lost love and inherited shame.For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph...

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK**• A 2002 FEATURE FILM**The unforgettable story of a young woman's odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes on her journey to redemption.“Liquid poetry.” —Oprah WinfreyAstrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her beauty to intimidate and manipulate. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world of ritual and myster...

Historical fiction powerhouse Monica Hesse’s extraordinary novel about a teenage girl in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam speaks powerfully to the realities of grief, heartbreak, and bravery. Perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys and Kristin Hannah.“A beautiful combination of heartbreak, loss, young love, and hope."—Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale...

Kathleen Grissom, New York Times bestselling author of the highly anticipated Glory Over Everything, established herself as a remarkable new talent with The Kitchen House, now a contemporary classic. In this gripping novel, a dark secret threatens to expose the best and worst in everyone tied to the estate at a thriving plantation in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War.Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavini...

In this provocative and starkly beautiful historical novel, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where slaves are the only available workers and where the family' s values and beliefs are sorely tested. In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, recently widowed and shunned by his fellow Quakers when he marries his young servant girl to help with his five small children, moves his shaken family down the Wilderness Road to the Virginia/Kentucky border. Although determined to ho...

**One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • A modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. • With a new introduction by Jesmyn Ward.“Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive.” —The New York Times**Sula and Ne...