Fiction

  • Patsy

    by Nicole Dennis-Benn

    $16.95

    A beautifully layered portrait of motherhood, immigration, and the sacrifices we make in the name of love from award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn.

    Heralded for writing “deeply memorable . . . women” (Jennifer Senior, New York Times), Nicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica her daughter, Tru, ironically struggles to understand why she was left behind. Greeted with international critical acclaim from readers who, at last, saw themselves represented in Patsy, this astonishing novel “fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness” (Joshunda Sanders, Time), offering up a vital portrait of the chasms between selfhood and motherhood, the American dream and reality.

  • The Mothers

    by Brit Bennett

    $17.00

    *ships in 5-7 business days*

    Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. It begins with a secret.

     

    All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.

     

    It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance--and the subsequent cover-up--will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

     

    In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a what if can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.
  • The Color Purple by Alice Walker
    $32.00

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Alice Walker’s iconic modern classic, now in a beautiful 40th anniversary Penguin Vitae edition with a foreword by Kiese Laymon

    A Penguin Classic Hardcover


    A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker’s epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey toward redemption and love.

  • Grievers

    by Adrienne Maree Brown

    $15.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    A tale of what happens when we can no longer ignore what has been lost in this world.

    Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.

    Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

  • The Wedding Date

    by Jasmine Guillory

    $15.00

    Ships in 7-10 Business Days

    Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn't normally do. But there's something about Drew Nichols that's too hard to resist.

    On the eve of his ex's wedding festivities, Drew is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend....

    After Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa heads home to Berkeley, where she's the mayor's chief of staff. Too bad they can't stop thinking about the other....

    They're just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century--or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want....

  • To Catch a Sinner (The Blurred Lines Duet)
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    From Wall Street Journal bestselling author Dylan Allen writing as Lucy Wilson-Tagoe comes the first story in her new Blurred Lines Duet series…

    Who gets to tell this story?
    The sinner who lived it?
    Or the saint who stole it?

    Sin Sackey is driven by the same hardwired need as every eldest first-generation daughter—to make her family proud. And she built her career and chose her partners with that single goal as her north star.

    Everyone said she had it all. And for more than twenty years, Sin let herself believe they were right.

    Until a near-death experience makes the truth impossible to deny.

    Her relationship is on life support. Her journalism career is in freefall. And the city she thought she’d conquer has chewed her up and spit her out.

    With everything to prove—and everything to lose—Sin moves back home to Washington, DC, determined to start over. No more chasing shadowy criminals. And no more men who look too good to be true.

    But on the eve of the first day of the rest of her new life, the saying about old habits proves painfully accurate.

    A new lead falls into her lap, and Sin dives back into the story that nearly cost her everything.
    Then, when a man who is all the things she’s sworn to avoid invites her to dinner, she says yes.

    After everything she’s been through, it’s reckless.

    But this story could resurrect her career—and take down an entire black-market empire. She’s closer than ever to catching its elusive leader, and she can’t let go now.

    And this man—who makes her blush, makes her laugh, and understands things she usually has to explain—could be the one. So, she lowers her walls just enough for him to climb over.

    But just when it seems her gamble might pay off, her lead starts to feel more like a trap. And the man she’s let herself love appears to be the one who set it.

    To Catch a Sinneris a steamy, suspenseful friends-to-lovers romance between a relentless journalist and a mysterious lawyer with a complicated shared past. Set against a fictionalized Washington, DC, this fast-paced, high-stakes story explores reclaiming identity, challenging power, and the pursuit of a new American dream.

  • One Summer in Savannah
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    "Nothing short of astonishing. The best writers are brave writers, and Harris has proven herself among those ranks." ―Mateo Askaripour, New York Times bestselling author of Black Buck

    Coming home means risking everything she's built and confronting everything she's survived.

    Eight years after surviving a sexual assault, Sara Lancaster has rebuilt her life far from her hometown of Savannah, Georgia. She pours herself into her poetry and her daughter, Alana: a precocious eight-year-old with a brilliant mind and a wild imagination. But when her father suffers a stroke, Sara has no choice but to return to the place that failed her and the people who never believed her story.

    Back in Savannah, Sara steps into her father's shoes at his beloved indie bookstore and tries to maintain a low profile. Her only priority is to keep Alana safe―and hidden―from the Wyler family, whose powerful, well-respected son is serving time for Sara's assault. What Sara doesn't expect is to discover that Jacob Wyler―her attacker's identical twin brother and once her teenage crush―has also returned to town, dealing with his own grief and shame. When the two reconnect, Sara and Jacob are drawn together by their shared losses, their love of language and science, and the ache of unresolved questions.

    One Summer in Savannah is a powerful debut about confronting trauma, reclaiming agency, and discovering unexpected paths toward forgiveness.

    "An unforgettable portrayal of familial tragedy, bravery, and redemption." ―Kim Michele Richardson, New York Times bestselling author of The Book Woman's Daughter

  • While We’re Here
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    Award-winning creators Anne Wynter and Micha Archer share a mother-daughter tale about delighting in small pleasures throughout the city. Perfect for fans of Oge Mora and Sophie Blackall. 

    Anne Wynter perfectly captures the hurry and hustle of a busy day. But when plans change and a girl and her mother slow down to savor small pleasures, the real celebration begins. 

    Dazzling, kaleidoscopic cut paper artwork from Caldecott Honor artist Micha Archer highlights each special moment in this sweet tribute to time spent together.

  • Octavia E. Butler: Lilith's Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy (LOA #393): Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago

    Octavia E. Butler

    $40.00

    For the first time in a deluxe, hardcover collector's edition, the landmark post-apocalyptic trilogy from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild”

    From the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild,” here in its spellbinding entirety is Octavia E. Butler’s epic of human survival and transformation. Conceived against a backdrop of Reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship, Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy—a classic of Afrofuturist speculative fiction—offers profound reflections on race, biology, colonialism, resistance, consent, sexuality, community, hybridity, technology, power, and the future of humankind.

    At the beginning of Dawn, Butler’s heroine Lilith Iyapo is awakened in a white cell, after centuries of suspended animation. She is a survivor, as is gradually revealed, of a nuclear apocalypse—and is now being healed, aboard an alien spaceship, by the terrifying and yet awe-inspiring Oankali. Searching the galaxy for new combinations of genes and DNA to acquire and trade, these advanced, uncanny beings are drawn to Lilith’s cancer, which will give them new powers: but should she, and the few of her kind that remain, agree to become one with their extraterrestrial saviors?

    Adulthood Rites tells the story of Lilith’s son, Akin, as he comes of age on a newly repopulated Earth. A “construct”—part-human, and part-Oankali—he is raised among human “resisters,” who live apart from Oankali technology. Negotiating the complexities of interspecies politics and his own hybrid identity, he emerges as a leader, forging a new path on Mars for the human/Oankali future.

    Imago follows another of Lilith’s hybrid progeny, Jodahs, through the jungles of a regenerating Earth. Raised as a male child, he discovers in his adolescence that he is becoming the first part-human ooloi, a member of the Oankali’s shapeshifting, astonishingly powerful and perceptive third sex—a discovery with intense personal and planetary consequences.

    Continuing the Library of America’s definitive edition of Butler’s works, this volume offers authoritative texts of the novels, helpful notes, and a chronology of Butler's life and career.

  • There Is Confusion (Modern Library Torchbearers)
    $16.00

    A rediscovered classic about how racism and sexism tests the spirit, ambition, and character of three children growing up in Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem, from the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP

    With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Morgan Jerkins

    Set in early-twentieth-century New York City, There Is Confusion tells the story of three Black children: Joanna Marshall, a talented dancer willing to sacrifice everything for success; Maggie Ellersley, an extraordinarily beautiful girl determined to leave her working-class background behind; and Peter Bye, a clever would-be surgeon who is driven by his love for Joanna. 

    As children, Maggie, Joanna, and Peter support one another’s dreams, but as young adults, romance threatens to upset the balance of their friendship. One afternoon, Joanna makes two irrevocable decisions—and sets off a chain of events that wreaks havoc with all of their lives. 

    First published to immense critical acclaim in 1924, written with an Austen-like eye for social dynamics, There Is Confusion is an unjustly forgotten classic that celebrates Black ambition, love, and the struggle for equality. 

    The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

  • Little Big Man

    Varian Johnson

    $18.99

    An excellent choice for Father's Day gifting! From literary powerhouse and Coretta Scott King Honor- and Boston Globe / Horn Book Honor-winning author of The Parker Inheritance Varian Johnson and New York Times bestselling illustrator Reggie Brown comes a heartwarming father-son story about the importance of stepping up...and finding time to play.

    Elijah can't wait to take his brand-new kite for its first flight! But with a new baby in the family, Daddy has to work this weekend. Elijah finds a clever way to help out and pitch in with his family while also reminding his dad how to still have a little fun.

    Beloved children's book author, Varian Johnson’s debut picture book highlights the fun journey of a young child building his confidence as he steps up into the big kid role, specifically as the little big man of the house.

    The perfect gift or Father's Day!

  • Jubilee (50th Anniversary Edition)

    Margaret Walker

    $17.99

    The best-selling classic about a mixed-race child in the Civil War–era South that “chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage” (New York Times Book Review).

    Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the antebellum South in both its opulence and its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction.

    Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light in a novel that churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.

    “A revelation.”—Milwaukee Journal

    Includes a Foreword by Nikki Giovanni

  • Unlikely Neighbors: A Spicy Opposites Attract Romance

    Renee Daniel Flagler

    $12.99

    A small-town woman’s journey of self-discovery takes an unexpected detour when she inherits a Brooklyn brownstone—complete with one hot next-door neighbor—in this sexy, emotional contemporary romance.

    When you least expect it, love comes knocking…

    Holland Davenport is ready to go beyond her small-town existence. Her plan involves moving into an apartment in Charleston—not inheriting a run-down brownstone in Brooklyn from a relative she never knew. Yet in a burst of daring, Holland meets the challenge head-on, moving to New York to learn more about her family and renovate the place. Add to that a gorgeous next-door neighbor who turns out to be a board member at her new job, and she’s definitely out of her depth.

    Noble Washington is the successful CEO of a company he spent a decade building. But his carefully ordered life begins to unravel the second he meets fiery social worker Holland—and spends one unforgettable night with a woman who should be off-limits.

    There’s a wall and a world of differences lying between them. But the sheltered Southerner and the ambitious native New Yorker feel a pull that just won’t be denied…

    From showing up to glowing up, the characters in Afterglow Books are on the path to leading their best lives and finding sizzling romance along the way. Don’t miss any of these other fun titles…

    Frenemy Fix-Up by Yahrah St. John

    Church Girl by Naima Simone

    Out of Office by A.H. Cunningham

  • Tender Is the Flesh

    by Agustina Bazterrica

    $17.99

    Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore.

    His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

    Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.

  • It's Elementary

    by Elise Bryant

    $19.00

    A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

    Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school’s brand-new DEI committee.

    As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it’s only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn’t in the light of day.

    Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it’s worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

    Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.

  • The Essential Harlem Detectives

    by Chester Himes

    $35.00

    Featuring A Rage in Harlem, The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, & Cotton Comes To Harlem

    A one-volume selection of four novels in a legendary detective series—blistering, groundbreaking capers set in Harlem's criminal underworld—by master crime writer Chester Himes A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin—and every bit their equal—Chester Himes is the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories, and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes authored nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished installments, his cold, wisecracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world, full of conniving con men, gun-toting gangsters, and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground is both riotous entertainment, enriched by his deftly plotted mysteries and scintillating dialogue, and a penetrating look into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

  • The Complete Stories

    by Zora Neale Hurston

    $15.99
    This landmark gathering of Zora Neale Hurston's short fiction—most of which appeared only in literary magazines during her lifetime—reveals the evolution of one of the most important African American writers. Spanning her career from 1921 to 1955, these stories attest to Hurston's tremendous range and establish themes that recur in her longer fiction. With rich language and imagery, the stories in this collection not only map Hurston's development and concerns as a writer but also provide an invaluable reflection of the mind and imagination of the author of the acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
  • You Dreamed of Empires: A Novel

    by Alvaro Enrigue

    $18.00

    From the visionary author of Sudden Death, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story.

    One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

    Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma – who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods – the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

    You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.

  • These Ghosts are Family

    by Maisy Card

    $18.00
    Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley.

    And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.

    These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.
  • IRL Author Talk: An Autobiography of Skin with LaKiesha Carr - March 1 at 6:30 PM CST
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    Join us as we celebrate The Autobiography of Skin with debut author, LaKiesha Carr!

    EVENT DEETS

    When: Wednesday, March 1 at 6:30 PM CST

    Where: Kindred Stories Reading Garden (2304 Stuart Street, HTX, 77004)

    How: RSVP to secure your seat or RSVP with book to support the author and Kindred Stories. Only books purchased from Kindred Stories will be eligible for the signing line.

    ABOUT THE BOOK

    Heat. Fire. Rain so blue. The blackness. The color of our hue.

    A magisterial, intimate look at Black womanhood: the grief that is carried within the body and the bonds of love that grant strength


    A middle-aged woman feed slots at a secret, back-room parlor. A new mother descends into a devastating postpartum depression, wracked with the fear that she is unable to protect her children. A daughter returns home to join the other women in her family waging spiritual combat with the ghosts of their past.

    An Autobiography of Skin is a dazzling and masterful portrait of interconnected generations in the South from a singular new voice, offering a raw and tender view into the interior lives of Black women. It is at once a powerful look at how experiences are carried inside the body, inside the flesh and skin, and a joyous testament to how healing can be found within—in love, mercy, gratitude, and freedom.

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

    LAKIESHA CARR graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Maytag Fellowship for Excellence in Fiction and a Jeff and Vicki Edwards Post-graduate Fellowship in Fiction. A journalist and writer from East Texas, she has held various editorial and production positions with CNN, The New York Times, and other media.

    ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

    Kendra Allen was born and raised in Dallas, Tx. She loves laughing, leaving, and writing. Some of her other work can be found in, or on, The Paris Review, High Times, The Rumpus, and more. She's the author of poetry collection The Collection Plate and essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, which won the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction. Fruit Punch, her memoir, is out now. 

  • Good Morning, Love: A Novel

    by Ashley Coleman

    $16.99

    *ship in 7-10 business days

    For fans of My (Not So) Perfect Life and Jasmine Guillory’s While We Were Dating, a disarmingly fun debut novel follows Carlisa Henton as her life comes undone after a chance meeting with a rising pop star.


    Carlisa “Carli” Henton is a musician and songwriter hoping to follow in her father’s musical footsteps. But, biding her time until she makes it big in the music industry, she works as a junior account manager at a big-name media company to cover her New York City rent. Carli meticulously balances her work with her musical endeavors as a songwriter—until a chance meeting with rising star Tau Anderson sends her calculated world into a frenzy. Their worlds collide and quickly blur the strict lines Carli has drawn between her business and her personal life, throwing Carli’s reputation—and her burgeoning songwriting career—into question.

    A smart, timely, energizing romance, Good Morning, Love shows us what the glamorous New York’s music scene is really like and takes us into the lives of a rising but somewhat troubled R&B star and a promising protégé who knows her job better than she knows herself.

    With fresh and honest prose, Good Morning, Love examines the uncertainty of being a new professional looking to chase a dream while also trying to survive in a world that’s not always kind to ambitious women.

  • Wahala: A Novel

    by Nikki May

    $17.99

    Ships in 7-10 business days.

    Ronke wants happily ever after and 2.2. kids. She’s dating Kayode and wants him to be “the one” (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he’s just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.

    Boo has everything Ronke wants—a kind husband, gorgeous child. But she’s frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.

    Simi is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she’s crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her “urban vibe.” Her husband thinks they’re trying for a baby. She’s not.

    When the high-flying, charismatic Isobel explodes into the group, it seems at first she’s bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Shanghai! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi, and Boo’s close friendship begins to crack.

    A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture, and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.

  • We Are Not Like Them

    by Christine Pride

    from $17.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Told from alternating perspectives, an evocative and riveting novel about the lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, whose friendship is indelibly altered by a tragic event—a powerful and poignant exploration of race in America today and its devastating impact on ordinary lives.

    Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. As adults, they remain as close as sisters, though their lives have taken different directions. Jen married young, and after years of trying, is finally pregnant. Riley pursued her childhood dream of becoming a television journalist and is poised to become one of the first Black female anchors of the top news channel in their hometown of Philadelphia.

    But the deep bond they share is severely tested when Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager. Six months pregnant, Jen is in freefall as her future, her husband’s freedom, and her friendship with Riley are thrown into uncertainty. Covering this career-making story, Riley wrestles with the implications of this tragic incident for her Black community, her ambitions, and her relationship with her lifelong friend.

    Like Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage and Jodi Picoult’s Small Great ThingsWe Are Not Like Them explores complex questions of race and how they pervade and shape our most intimate spaces in a deeply divided world. But at its heart, it’s a story of enduring friendship—a love that defies the odds even as it faces its most difficult challenges.

     

    Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. As adults, they remain as close as sisters, though their lives have taken different directions. Jen married young, and after years of trying, is finally pregnant. Riley pursued her childhood dream of becoming a television journalist and is poised to become one of the first Black female anchors of the top news channel in their hometown of Philadelphia. But the deep bond they share is severely tested when Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager. Six months pregnant, Jen is in freefall as her future, her husband’s freedom, and her friendship with Riley are thrown into uncertainty. Covering this career-making story, Riley wrestles with the implications of this tragic incident for her Black community, her ambitions, and her relationship with her lifelong friend. Like Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage and Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things, We Are Not Like Them explores complex questions of race and how they pervade and shape our most intimate spaces in a deeply divided world. But at its heart, it’s a story of enduring friendship—a love that defies the odds even as it faces its most difficult challenges.
  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself

    by Harriet Jacobs

    $15.00
    One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in America

    A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseduonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother's attic, Jacobs skillfully used the literary genres of her time, presenting a thoroughly feminist narrative that portrays the evils and traumas of slavery, particularly for women and children.

    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
  • A Brief History of Seven Killings

    by Marlon James

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    In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

    On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer’s house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins’ fates. A Brief History of Seven Killings is James’s fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica’s history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts—James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an “exhilarating” (The New York Times) epic that’s been called “a tour de force” (The Wall Street Journal).
  • Dead Dead Girls

    by Nekesa Afia

    $16.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*


    Winter 1916

    The wind whips against her face. Snowflakes stick to her hair, her cheeks, her eyelashes.

    She’s disoriented as she tries to find her way home. The sun set at four in the afternoon, but it’s much later now. It’s so dark that it feels as if blackness has swallowed up the city. She’s making her way down the streets, relying on streetlamps and muscle memory. It’s impossible to see in the snow.

    She knows two things: first, that she’s going to be in big trouble for being so late; second, that it’s not going to be easy to locate her house in this terrible storm. It’s a small home. She’s the oldest of four girls. The youngest are twins—­high energy and overly demanding of her patience. It’s exhausting to keep them in line. They don’t behave as they’re supposed to. Even worse, they’re all crammed into one bedroom.

    They live with their widowed father and his sister. Her aunt is strict, but her father is ruthless. He works in the church and has high standards for his children. She also suspects he resents all of them for not being boys. He can snap at any time, for any reason. Anything she can do to protect the twins, she will do.

    What’s the world like outside of this place? she wonders.

    Maybe someday she’ll find out.

    Maybe not.

  • Caul Baby

    by Morgan Jerkins

    from $16.99

    *ships/available for pickup in 7-10 business days

    Laila desperately wants to become a mother, but each of her previous pregnancies has ended in heartbreak. This time has to be different, so she turns to the Melancons, an old and powerful Harlem family known for their caul, a precious layer of skin that is the secret source of their healing power.

    When a deal for Laila to acquire a piece of caul falls through, she is heartbroken, but when the child is stillborn, she is overcome with grief and rage. What she doesn’t know is that a baby will soon be delivered in her family—by her niece, Amara, an ambitious college student—and delivered to the Melancons to raise as one of their own. Hallow is special: she’s born with a caul, and their matriarch, Maman, predicts the girl will restore the family’s prosperity.

    Growing up, Hallow feels that something in her life is not right. Did Josephine, the woman she calls mother, really bring her into the world? Why does her cousin Helena get to go to school and roam the streets of New York freely while she’s confined to the family’s decrepit brownstone?

    As the Melancons’ thirst to maintain their status grows, Amara, now a successful lawyer running for district attorney, looks for a way to avenge her longstanding grudge against the family. When mother and daughter cross paths, Hallow will be forced to decide where she truly belongs.

  • Ghostroots : Stories

    'Pemi Aguda

    $17.99

    In this beguiling collection of twelve imaginative stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, ’Pemi Aguda dramatizes the tension between our yearning to be individuals and the ways we are haunted by what came before.

    In “Manifest,” a woman sees the ghost of her abusive mother in her daughter’s face. Shortly after, the daughter is overtaken by wicked and destructive impulses. In “Breastmilk,” a wife forgives her husband for his infidelity. Months later, when she is unable to produce milk for her newborn, she blames herself for failing to uphold her mother’s feminist values and doubts her fitness for motherhood. In “Things Boys Do,” a trio of fathers finds something unnatural and unnerving about their infant sons. As their lives rapidly fall to pieces, they begin to fear that their sons are the cause of their troubles. And in “24, Alhaji Williams Street,” a teenage boy lives in the shadow of a mysterious disease that’s killing the boys on his street.

    These and other stories in Ghostroots map emotional and physical worlds that lay bare the forces of family, myth, tradition, gender, and modernity in Nigerian society. Powered by a deep empathy and glinting with humor, they announce a major new literary talent.

  • The Heirs
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    From the award-winning New York Times and Indie bestselling author of Ace of Spades comes a mystery about five teen geniuses, their billionaire father, and the aftermath of his murder―perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying, Holly Jackson, and How to Get Away with Murder!

    Five prodigies, one dead father, a mansion full of suspects…

    Octavius the Maestro.
    Fola the Brain.
    Bilal the Olympian.
    Perdita the Artist.
    Romeo the Failure.

    These are the five heirs of the illustrious billionaire Leontes Button. Adopted and viciously trained with their father’s infamous “Button Method” to prove his hypothesis for creating prodigies―child geniuses―the Button siblings have had no choice but to be brilliant according to their father's impossibly high standards.

    Until he is murdered at his annual Prodigy Ball.

    Now, all who attended the ball are required to stay in the Button Manor while the police investigate. But the officers have their work cut out for them―each of the Button siblings has something to hide, but The Heirs aren't the only ones with secrets. After all, Leontes Button was especially good at making enemies. . .

  • Dead First
    $30.00

    From the Bram Stoker award-nominated author of The Spite House comes a bone-chilling new novel about a private investigator hired by a mysterious billionaire to discover why he can’t die.

    When private investigator Shyla Sinclair is invited to the looming mansion of mysterious Texan tycoon Saxton Braith, she’s more than a little suspicious. The last thing she expects to see that night is Braith’s assistant driving an iron rod straight through the back of his skull. Scratch that—the last thing she expects to see is Braith’s resurrection afterward.

    Braith can’t die, it turns out, but he has no explanation for his immortality, and very few intact memories of his past. Which is why he wants to pay Shyla millions to investigate him, and bring his long-buried history to light.

    Shyla can’t help but be intrigued, but she’s also trapped by the offer. Braith has made it clear that he knows she’s the only person he can trust with his secret, because he knows all about hers.

    Bold, atmospheric, and utterly frightening, Johnny Compton’s Dead First is spine-chilling supernatural horror about the pursuit of power and the undying need for reckoning.

  • Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon
    $32.00

    Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious

    In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racial identity – these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of the authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

    With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands … of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with – without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

    To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most profound and subversive way yet. With a foreword from her son, Ford Morrison, and an introduction from her Princeton comparative literature colleague, Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

  • All the Men I've Loved Again: A Novel
    from $19.00

    From Christine Pride, the beloved coauthor of the Good Morning America Book Club Pick We Are Not Like Them, comes a dazzling solo debut novel about a woman who finds herself in the impossible situation of being in love with the same two men who won her heart in her early twenties again as she nears forty.

    It’s 1999, TLC’s “No Scrubs” is topping the charts, y2k is looming on everyone’s mind, and Cora Belle has arrived at college ready to change her life. She’s determined to grow out of the shy, sheltered girl who attended an all-white prep in her all-white suburb. Cora is ready to conquer her fears and find her people, her place in the world, and herself.

    What she’s totally unprepared for is Lincoln, with his dark skin, charming southern drawl, and that smile. Because how can you ever prepare yourself for the rollercoaster of first love with all its glorious, bewildering contradictions? Just when Cora thinks she’s got things figured out, a series of surprises and secrets threaten to upend everything she thought she understood about love and loyalty.

    In the wake of these developments and a shocking tragedy, a new man enters Cora’s life—Aaron—further complicating everything. He’s the only one who seems to get her, and the letters she writes to him when the two are separated reveal the truth of their inescapable connection. There’s only one problem—how can she fall in love with one man when her heart belongs to another?

    Twenty years later, and Cora is all grown up, or mostly, and has cloaked herself in loneliness like a warm blanket. It’s the safest choice. But then an unexpected reconnection and a chance encounter puts her right back where she started. The same two men, the same agonizing decision.

    Finding herself in this position—again—will test everything Cora thought she knew about fate, love, and most importantly, herself. All The Men I’ve Loved Again is a big-hearted coming-of-age story for anyone who’s thought what if about a past love and what it would be like to have a second chance.

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