Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
From the New York Times Bestselling Author of An American Marriage
"A love story . . . Full of perverse wisdom and proud joy . . . Jones's skill for wry understatement never wavers."
-O: The Oprah Magazine
"Silver Sparrow will break your heart before you even know it. Tayari Jones has written a novel filled with characters I'll never forget. This is a book I'll read more than once."
-Judy Blume
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow,...
Author
Language
English
Description
NOW AN APPLE TV+ SERIES STARRING SAMUEL L. JACKSON
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a masterful, moving novel about age, memory, and family from one of the true literary icons of our time.
Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking...
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is a masterful, moving novel about age, memory, and family from one of the true literary icons of our time.
Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
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
Formats
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
Sherry has struggled all her life to understand who she is, where she comes from, and, most importantly, why her mother slapped her cheek one summer afternoon. The incident has haunted Sherry, and it causes her to dig into her family's past. Like many family histories, it is fractured and reluctant to reveal its secrets; but Sherry remains determined. In just a few days' time, her extended family will gather for a reunion, and Sherry sets off across...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
In one West Philadelphia neighborhood, families come together in celebration of unity and togetherness. Their block parties provide a union that serves as a backdrop for discovering the truth about themselves and the people they think they know. Best friends Neet and Shay have depended on each other for most of their lives. However, their friendship will be tested when Neet becomes pregnant by one of the corner boys and Shay arranges an abortion that...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric...
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric...
Author
Language
English
Description
"You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory's...
10) October suite
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
It is 1950 and October Brown is a twenty-three-year-old first-year teacher thanking her lucky stars that she found a room in the best boardinghouse for Negro women teachers in Wyandotte County, Kansas. During an affair with an unhappily married handyman, October becomes pregnant.
With job in jeopardy and her reputation in tatters, October goes back to Ohio to be with her family: her older sister, Vergie, and her aunts who raised the sisters after...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide. Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...
12) Gabriel's story
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.8 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
In his acclaimed debut novel, Durham adds a new dimension to the frontier narrative. Gabriel, the teenaged son of an emancipated slave, travels west with his mother, who is lured by the promise of unclaimed land. Despising life as a farmer, Gabriel runs away with a dangerous band of cowboys. But hindered by youth and inexperience, he must escape the racism and brutality that surround him.
13) The Turner house
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
Formats
Description
Welcome to the life of the Prince brothers. Come feel what it's like to be Addicted to a Dirty South Thug.
Khian "Khi" Prince is a certified boss with what seems to be the weight of the world on his shoulders. His job is to ensure that he and his brothers maintain their status in the streets, along with caring for his two baby mamas and the kids he shares with them. After failing twice at love, Khi's not ready to give up on finding his queen just...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A Black father makes amends with his gay son through letters written on his deathbed in this wise and penetrating novel of empathy and forgiveness, for fans of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robert Jones Jr. and Alice Walker As Jacob lies dying, he begins to write a letter to his only son, Isaac. They have not met or spoken in many years, and there are things that Isaac must know. Stories about his ancestral legacy in rural Arkansas that extend back to slavery....
16) Eden
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield has just impulsively drawn a naked woman on the pages of Genesis in bright red lipstick during Sunday service. The community is scandalized, and her devout, long-suffering mother's response is to force her to spend weekends nursing her Aunt Pip-an outcast who lives on the edge of town.
Now Maddy moves between her own home-which she shares with her hard-working, Bible-reading mother and her drinking,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Neena's mother, Freeda, disappeared on a cold February morning in 1984, leaving the fifteen-year-old Neena and her younger sister, Tish, in the care of Nan, their stern grandmother. Two decades later, Neena-no longer living in Philadelphia-supports herself by blackmailing married men. Returning to her childhood home when a sting goes terribly wrong, she avoids her grandmother while attempting to pull one last hustle on a prominent local lawyer. But...
18) Sweetsmoke
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Screenwriter David Fuller spent eight years researching Sweetsmoke, in the process discovering that members of his family fought on both sides of the Civil War. Cassius Howard is a skilled slave, once his master's favorite. But his master Hoke is now little more than a fragile old man, depressed about an ever-shrinking plantation and losing a son to war. When an old freedwoman who once saved Cassius from Hoke's wrath is killed, Cassius risks everything...
19) P.G. County
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
From Connie Briscoe, the best-selling author of the critically acclaimed Sisters & Lovers, comes the sexy, bold, dishy contemporary novel P.G. County. In the tradition of the classic Peyton Place, P.G. County offers an alluring portrait of five lives-from fabulously wealthy and powerful to meek and modest-as they interact in an affluent black suburb of Prince George's County, Maryland. Featuring a lively narration from Caroline Clay, this delightful...
20) Can't get enough
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Connie Briscoe delivers a captivating sequel to her hit novel P.G. County. Newly sober Barbara Bentley, her womanizing husband Bradford, and the other wealthy residents of Silver Lake are steering their lives in new directions. And then royalty arrives in the person of Baroness Veronique Valentine, who claims to be everyone's friend.