It is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove, a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue eyed children can devastate all others, who prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, so people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, Deacon King Kong, Five-Carat Soul, and Kill 'Em and Leave, a James Brown biography.
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, setting loose a drama...

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride...

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith.

A searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult.

"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"-- Frank is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. He is shocked out of his apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life.

Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis brings back the beguiling character Major General Ransom Jarvis in this third Mrs. Norris Mystery, a prequel, which immerses the redoubtable crime-solving Scottish housekeeper in a murder investigation in the nation’s capital
With a new president in the White House, Major General Ransom Jarvis suspects that his retirement from the US Army is imminent. But at Washington’s...

A bitterly comic novel of middle-aged angst and middle-class American life in the 1960s, by the acclaimed author of Little Big Man
It is the late sixties in suburbia, and Carlo Reinhart’s life is a mess. He’s fat, broke, middle aged, and unemployed. His anarchist son hates him, and his wife has taken a younger lover and thrown Carlo out of the house. In fact, the only one who doesn’t consider him contemptible...

Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis introduces one of her most winning heroines, Julie Hayes, a former actress turned fortune-teller who abruptly learns there is murder in her future
Twenty-five-year-old Julie Hayes is feeling overshadowed by her globe-trotting journalist husband and looking for some excitement and direction in life. On what amounts to a dare, she sets herself up as "Friend Julie," a storefront fortune-teller...