PRE-ORDER.  ON SALE DATE: March 25, 2025

Winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize,Behind the Waterline takes readers to the home of a teenager and his grandmother in a New Orleans neighborhood on the eve of Katrina, where there are few resources and little warning of what is about to happen, in this novel that mixes magical realism with reality.

When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle's masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric's street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric's grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric-in a dream, a hallucination, or something else-discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people-those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.

PRE-ORDER.  ON SALE DATE: January 21, 2025

Elaine Neil Orr, born in Nigeria to expat parents, brings us an indelible portrait of a young female artist, torn between two men and two cultures, struggling to find her passion and her purpose. 

It’s 1963 and Isabel Hammond is an expat who has accompanied her agriculture aid worker husband to Nigeria, where she is hoping to find inspiration for her art and for her life. Then she meets charismatic local singer Bobby Tunde, and they share a night of passion that could upend everything. Seeking solace and distraction, she returns to her painting and her home in a rural village where she plants a lemon tree and unearths an ancient statue buried in her garden. She knows that the dancing female figure is not hers to keep, yet she is reluctant to give it up, and soon, she notices other changes that make her wonder what the dancing woman might portend. 

Against the backdrop of political unrest in Nigeria, Isabel’s personal situation also becomes precarious. She finds herself in the center of a tide of suspicion, leaving her torn between the confines of her domestic life and the desire to immerse herself in her art and in the culture that surrounds her. The expat society, the ancient Nigerian culture, her beautiful family, and even the statue hidden in a back room—each trouble and beguile Isabel. Amid all of this, can she finally become who she wants to be?

A riveting story about the Black Panther Party and the high cost that can come with revolution

Raised in Haiti by a father deeply embedded in activism, Nettie Boileau joins the Black Panthers’ Free Health Clinics in Oakland in 1968. She quickly becomes devoted to the cause and its dedication to helping people in a racially divided America—and gets swept up in an all-consuming love affair with Melvin Mosley, a defense captain of the Black Panther Party. But when Nettie and Melvin head to Chicago to help launch the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, they find themselves targets of J. Edgar Hoover’s famous covert campaigns against civil rights leaders. As she learns more about the inner workings of the Panthers—and her relationship with Melvin reveals its own fault lines—Nettie discovers that fighting for social justice may not always mean equal justice for women. She must figure out what is left for her within the movement, what she stands for, and whom she can count on.

For fans of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, Fabienne Josaphat’s Kingdom of No Tomorrow takes readers inside the Black Panther movement in this timely story of self-determination and the importance of revolution amid injustice.

A major new novel set in nineteenth-century New Orleans by the author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

New Orleans, 1853. A young exile named Benito Juárez disembarks at a fetid port city at the edge of a swamp. Years later, he will become the first indigenous head of state in the postcolonial Americas, but now he is as anonymous and invisible as any other migrant to the roiling and alluring city of New Orleans.

Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, suffer through the heat of a southern summer, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the grotesque traffic in human beings they witness as they try to shape their future.

Though the historical archive is silent about the eighteen months Juárez spent in New Orleans, Yuri Herrera imagines how Juárez's time there prepared him for what was to come. With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera's fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: February 25, 2024

A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms in this moving debut.
 
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.
 
When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests’ coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.
 
With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
    Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
    At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

A riveting, adventurous novel inspired by the life of pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, a Black woman who learned to fly at the dawn of aviation, and found freedom in the air.

For fans of Hidden Figures, The Great Circle, and I Was Amelia Earhart, A Pair of Wings is an epic novel about pioneer aviatrix Bessie Coleman, whose story has waited 100 years to be told. A few years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, Bessie was working the Texas cotton fields with her family when an airplane flew right over their heads. It buzzed so low she thought she could catch it in her hands. Bessie wasn’t afraid. Without even thinking, she spread her arms out and pretended she was flying. She knew there was freedom in those wings.

The daughter of a woman born into slavery, Bessie answers the call of the great migration, moving to Chicago as a single woman. While working as a manicurist in the White Sox barbershop, she wins the backing of two wealthy, powerful Black men, Robert Abbott, the publisher of The Chicago Defender, and Jesse Binga, Chicago’s first Black banker. Abbott becomes her mentor and chronicles her adventures, while the good-looking gun-toting Binga becomes her lover. Her first love, though, remains the airplane.

But in 1920, no one in the U.S. will train a Black woman to fly, so 26- year-old Bessie learns to speak French and bets it all on an epic journey to Europe as she begins a quest to defy the odds and gravity itself. Two years ahead of Amelia Earhart, Bessie is molded by battle-hardened French and German combat pilots, who teach her death-defying stunts. Bessie’s signature majestic loops, spiky barrel rolls, and hairpin turns, just like her hardscrabble journey, are spellbinding.

While she finds there is no prejudice in the air, Bessie must wrestle with many challenges: She nearly dies in a plane crash, one of her brothers seems to be crumbling under the weight of Jim Crow, and as she grapples with tough truths about Binga, Bessie begins to wonder if the freedom she finds is the air means she must otherwise fly solo.

With tenderness and verve, Carole Hopson imagines the breathtaking moxie that led Bessie Coleman to strap up knee-high boots and don a self-designed flight suit to become “Queen Bess” of the sky.

In this riveting take on One Thousand and One Nights, Shaherazade, at the center of her own story, uses wit and political mastery to navigate opulent palaces brimming with treachery and the perils of the Third Crusade as her Persian homeland teeters on the brink of destruction.

In twelfth century, Persia, clever and dreamy Shaherazade stumbles on the Malik’s beloved wife entwined with a lover in a sun-dappled courtyard. When Shaherazade recounts her first tale, the story of this infidelity, to the Malik, she sets the Seljuk Empire on fire.

Enraged at his wife’s betrayal, the once-gentle Malik beheads her. But when that killing does not quench his anger, the Malik begins to marry and behead a new bride each night. Furious at the murders, his province seethes on rebellion’s edge. To suppress her guilt, quell threats of a revolt, and perhaps marry the man she has loved since childhood, Shaherazade persuades her beloved father, the Malik’s vizier, to offer her as the next wife. On their wedding night, Shaherazade begins a yarn, but as the sun ascends she cuts the story short, ensuring that she will live to tell another tale, a practice she repeats night after night.

But the Malik’s rage runs too deep for Shaherazade to exorcise alone. And so she and her father persuade the Malik to leave Persia to join Saladin’s fight against the Crusaders in Palestine. With plots spun against the Seljuks from all corners, Shaherazade must maneuver through intrigue in the age’s greatest courts to safeguard her people. All the while, she must keep the Malik enticed with her otherworldly tales―because the slightest misstep could cost Shaherazade her head.

This suspenseful first-person retelling is vividly rendered through the voice of a fully imagined Shaherazade, a book lover whose late mother bestowed the gift of story that becomes her power. Created over fourteen years of writing and research, Jamila Ahmed’s gorgeously written debut is a celebration of storytelling and a love letter to the medieval Islamic world that brings to life one of the most enduring and intriguing woman characters of all time.

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A stunning portrait of an African princess raised in Queen Victoria’s court and adapting to life in Victorian England—based on the real-life story of a recently rediscovered historical figure, Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

With a brilliant mind and a fierce will to survive, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a kidnapped African princess, is rescued from enslavement at seven years old and presented to Queen Victoria as a “gift.” To the Queen, the girl is an exotic trophy to be trotted out for the entertainment of the royal court and to showcase Victoria’s magnanimity. Sarah charms most of the people she meets, even those who would cast her aside. Her keen intelligence and her aptitude for languages and musical composition helps Sarah navigate the Victorian era as an outsider given insider privileges.

But embedded in Sarah’s past is her destiny. Haunted by visions of destruction and decapitations, she desperately seeks a place, a home she will never run from, never fear, a refuge from nightmares and memories of death.

From West Africa to Windsor Castle to Sierra Leone, to St. James's Palace, and the Lagos Colony, Sarah juggles the power and pitfalls of a royal upbringing as she battles racism and systematic oppression on her way to living a life worthy of a Yoruba princess.

Based on the real life of Queen Victoria’s Black goddaughter, Sarah Forbes Bonetta’s story is a sweeping saga of an African princess in Victorian England and West Africa, as she searches for a home, family, love, and identity.