African American Families

The son of Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson is a critically acclaimed author and poet in his own right. Echoes of a Distant Summer is the story of Jackson St. Clair Tremain, a San Francisco civil servant who thought he had left his old life far behind. In 1982, Jackson is summoned to Mexico to confer with his dying grandfather, the brutal hustler King Tremain. When King dies, Jackson inherits $50 million - and the unwanted attentions of a malevolent bayou crime lord named Pug DuMont.

Rio Duncan is one of the youngest children of the Duncan clan. With no solid position in the family business like his other siblings, he has been feeling out of place and decides to disappear. Rio leaves his Duncan identity behind and goes on a search for friends and family who can relate to him. His destination is Baltimore, and he is sure to find what he is looking for in the city with a community like no other.

Light-skinned Selina Standish lives a life of emotional pain and torment. In 1906, at the age of eight, she is convinced by her mother, actress Lavinia Standish, the daughter of a slave, to pass as white. Although Selina yields to her mother's insistence to pass, she refuses to cut ties completely with her Negro relatives, including her twin brother, a child her mother deems too dark. However, at age 17, in the year 1915, Selina meets wealthy Southerner Jack Cosgrove, the man of her dreams. Keeping her ancestry a secret, Selina is conflicted by Jack's negative attitude toward her race.

Blackboard and Essence best-selling author Francis Ray has been honored with the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, as well as the EMMA and Golden Pen Awards. Here, she continues the saga of the Grayson family with Morgan's story. Mother Ruth Grayson is pushing her son to get married, but he resists - until he meets Phoenix, a beautiful artist with a secret.

In The Other Madisons, Bettye Kearse - a descendant of a slave named Coreen and, according to oral tradition, President James Madison - finally shares her family story, exploring legacy, race, and the powerful consequences of telling the whole truth.

Love wasn’t supposed to be a part of the deal… Even a famed matchmaker like Nolan Madaris’s great-grandmother can’t get it right every time. Nolan, the notorious fun-loving ladies’ man, could never connect with someone as straitlaced as tech whiz Ivy Chapman. Yet the scheme Ivy proposes is tempting - they can pretend to be a couple, just long enough to satisfy their families. But someone forgot to clue in their hearts. What happens, though, when Ivy’s plan to get her relatives off her back has an unexpected side effect: getting her into Nolan’s bed?

The new novel in Kimberla Lawson Roby's beloved New York Times bestselling Curtis Black series. "Roby's latest sizzles with scandal. A deliciously decadent beach read of temptation and the wages of sin." -- Kirkus Reviews Raven Black is bouncing back after her very public divorce from Dillon...

Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so deftly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early twentieth century, Irene and Val fall in love...

It's been four years since twenty-eight-year old Alicia Black, daughter of Reverend Curtis Black, divorced her second husband, the most womanizing and corrupt man she has ever known. Since then, Alicia has been dating her first husband, Phillip Sullivan, a wonderfully kind and true man of God...

The infamous Reverend Curtis Black's sordid past is no secret, as his wife, Charlotte, is well aware. But when Curtis' long-time mistress and mother of his illegitimate two-year-old, dies, he and Charlotte have no choice but to raise Curtina together. While the living, breathing reminder of her...

Familiar faces and places meet fresh twists and turns in this enthralling novel from acclaimed author Pearl Cleage. Atlanta’s West End district has always been a haven and home to a coterie of unique characters—artists and thinkers, dreamers and doers. Folks here know one another’s...

A la edad de veinte años y después de haber salido de la Marina, Chris Gardner, llegó a San Francisco para continuar una carrera prometedora en la medicina. Considerado un hijo prodigio de la investigación científica, sorprendió a todos y a sí mismo estableciendo su punto de vista en el...

“Frank…writes with genuine adoration for and authority on the South Carolina Lowcountry from which she sprang….[Her] stuff is never escapist fluff—it’s the real deal.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution Return to Tall Pines in the long-awaited sequel to Dorothea Benton Frank’s beloved...

Harris serves up a treat that will capture and enchant audiences everywhere—a big, bold, and irresistible novel about football, family, and secrets. Brady Bledsoe and his mother, Carmyn, have a strong relationship. A single mother, faithful churchgoer, and the owner of several successful...

Fortysomething and still single, music-video exec Pia Jamison has given up her grandiose ideas on men and marriage but not motherhood. Her biological clock is on red alert, but after years of self-imposed celibacy she has no clue how to attract the man she needs to get the baby she wants. Help...

In the same vein as her critically acclaimed debut novel, Upstate, Kalisha Buckhanon again shares an emotionally beautiful story about today’s youth that magnifies the unforgettable power of hope and the human spirit. Buckhanon takes us to Chicago, 1992, and into the life of fifteen-year-old...

As seen on PBS’s POV An unprecedented guide to helping black boys achieve success at every stage of their lives—at home, at school, and in the world Regardless of how wealthy or poor their parents are, all black boys must confront and surmount the “achievement gap”: a divide that...

A mother-daughter story of reinvention—about an African American woman who unexpectedly inherits a sugarcane farm in Louisiana Why exactly Charley Bordelon’s late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous...

In this compelling urban tale, Karim Spencer becomes a successful businessman - despite being raised by a bootlegger in a bad section of town. His sister is a down-on-her-luck stripper with a gangsta-wannabe son, and his despondent brother is serving a life sentence for a murder he didn't commit.

Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family; and, most especially, Clara's sister, 10-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister's death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become.