African American Families

Can white moms and Black moms ever truly be friends? Not just mom friends, but like really real friends? And does it matter? “Utterly addictive . . . Through her sharp wit and dynamic anecdotal storytelling, Helena Andrews-Dyer shines a light on the cultural differences that separate Black...

Timbuktu, western Africa, 1706. Folashade, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a professor of linguistics, is sent south with her older sisters, Bibi and Adaeze, to endure the painful ceremony that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is expected to. In Djenné, on the banks of the Niger, the sisters’ fate and that of their fellow Bambara are changed forever when they’re kidnapped, marched toward grueling indignities on Gorée Island, and eventually hauled aboard an English slaver bound for the Americas.

“The magic here is not the supernatural kind, but rather an attention to the grace of the ordinary. It is the magic of watching these women come into their power.”—New York Times A GMA Buzz Pick! A Most Anticipated Book by Essence · The Millions · Atlantic Journal Constitution · Glamour...

Ameerah Vincent rose from the unforgiving streets of Brooklyn’s projects to become one of the most powerful real estate moguls in the world. With an empire that caters to the ultra-wealthy, a luxury lifestyle that includes her own private island, and a passionate love affair with the dashing Xavier Coleman, Ameerah has it all.

Lina Henry is a wife and mother who likens herself to a pretty paper doll. She lives in a beautiful home in the Atlanta suburbs. Her husband, David, is a well-to-do investment banker. She’s raised two wonderful teenagers. To the outside world, the Henry family is perfect. What no one knows is that Lina’s paper doll life is being torn apart in a controlling and abusive marriage. Then Lina develops an unexpected friendship with another man, and reconnects with her former best friend. But as David senses his loss of control, he becomes more dangerous.

The sudden death of an alcoholic, lying, and manipulative mother sets off a chain of events that forces two worlds to eventually collide, releasing secrets and pain that could change the lives of everyone involved. Janice Williams is finally living the life that she's always dreamed. A respected dean of a university, with an adoring husband, she is finally happy - except for the hole in her heart that remains from a long-ago tragedy. Nicole Henry is enjoying the carefree life of a college student, until her adoptive parents announce they're divorcing and tapped out financially.

Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the Civil Rights Movement sweeps the nation in Promise, a “magical, magnificent novel” (Marlon James) from “a startlingly fresh voice” (Jacqueline Woodson). A KIRKUS...

A piercing short story collection that explores the feverish hunger and dizzying pleasure of girlhood and queer coming-of-age in a small town, from an acclaimed emerging writer Set mostly in and around a small working class neighborhood, Clark explores the lives of young Black girls, women, and...

Six generations of Mason Family men have maintained the black stone bridge that once led to the sugarcane fields of Dieffenbach Plantation, but now leads to a barbed-wire fence separating the town of Diffenbourg, Louisiana from Caesar Oil Company’s petroleum tank farm. Warren Mason was to be the bridge’s next guardian, but his departure has left its upkeep in the hands of his ailing father who has spent his life preserving it, and his myopic older brother who would sacrifice it to settle a class action with Caesar.

Growing up poor in Texas, Vera Lomax used every gold-digging trick in the book to land a rich husband. Now living in the lap of luxury in San Francisco, her only job is to fawn over her much-older husband, so it's been easy for her to balance a life of shopping and affairs with younger men with a major secret: the 16-year bribery of one of her husband's mistresses to keep her pregnancy under wraps. Vera figures that a little hush money every month will ensure her husband's fortune is hers alone....

Critically acclaimed, for readers of Paul Beatty's The Sellout and Jennifer Egan's The Candy House, a moving and darkly funny novel about an attempt to found an underground Utopia. An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a...

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares “Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and...

An unexpected family photograph leads Dionne Ford to uncover the stories of her enslaved female ancestors, reclaim their power, and begin to heal Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose...

After World War II, Needham family members migrated north to Philadelphia from South Carolina, leaving behind the tragic injustice surrounding the violent death of their patriarch, King. His devoted widow, Selma, remains on the old home place. Over the years, she raises King's children, including his great-grandson, Rayne, on whom falls the responsibility to bring the family together to save the family land and mend the rift between him and his mother.

A 1960s teen pop group determined to conquer the music world must contend with the cost of fame—and a ghost with a grisly past—in this riveting family story from the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Kids. “My favorite kind of read: epic and immersive, riding the line between...

A reissue of a hidden gem from the award-winning author of Sugar, this novel tells the story of a woman who uncovers the fragility of life and the enduring strength of family love. Camilla’s childhood was immersed in love and chaos, and steeped in perfection. As an adult she hasn’t looked...

A story inside a story inside a story. A man visits his aging father in a nursing home, where his father writes the novel he imagines his son would write. Or is it the novel that the son imagines his father would imagine, if he were to imagine the kind of novel the son would write?

Roux is a novel that brims with family, secrets, and love. Award-winning author Tamika Christy writes about the devastation of loss, the difficulty of relationships, and the family ties that bond. Written in the vein of Steel Magnolias, the story takes us into the lives of African American families with their unique hardships, triumphs in relationships, culture, and values. It is relatable, comforting, and challenging.

The Baby-Sitters Club meets Stranger Things in this “spooky, heart-filled” (Lora Senf, author of The Clackity) middle grade novel about friendship, fitting in, and the afterlife, following a girl who discovers she’s not the only one at her new school who can see ghosts. Wednesday Thomas...

Shannon Sanders’s sparkling debut brings us into the company of the Collins family and their acquaintances as they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. Moving from Atlantic City to New York to DC, from the 1960s to the 2000s, from law students to drag performers to violinists to matriarchs, Company tells a multifaceted, multigenerational saga in thirteen stories.