In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black?

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.

Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell’s astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.

“Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home.

Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either.

Nearly 3 Million Copies Sold · 8 starred reviews · William C. Morris Award Winner · National Book Award Longlist · Printz Honor Book · Coretta Scott King Honor Book · #1 New York Times Bestseller

“Simply beautiful to read. The Hate U Give is an outstanding debut novel and says more about the contemporary black experience in America than any book I have read for years, fiction or non-fiction.” - Alex Wheatle, The Guardian

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. A phenomenal #1 bestseller that became a symbol for a searing moment in the fight for justice in America, The Hate U Give is a heartrending, boldly original, unforgettable chronicle of a vital chapter in our nation’s story—and has cemented Angie Thomas’s place as one of her generation’s most important writers.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: What really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight-and-narrow for him — until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire.  But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated – and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime.  It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem.  He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret.

1976.  Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations.  Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes.  When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

CROOK MANIFESTO is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family.  Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.

An extraordinary new novel about family, legacy, and an inherited curse, from National Book Award–nominated author LaToya Watkins

Set across Texas and spanning four generations, The Book of Chuck is a gimlet-eyed investigation into birthright and belonging through the story of one family in which certain members have clairvoyant powers.

“Pa, no go. Him burn.” When baby Nannie utters these prophetic words in 1936, she marks herself as cursed. The ability to see death before it happens forever changes the course of her life, and the lives of her descendants.

Forty years later, Chuck is about to become a father. He intends to make a home filled with love, unlike the one he was born into. But when he begins paying visits to his estranged mother, Nannie, in search of answers, she starts pushing him away from the life he’s always wanted.

It’s the cusp of a new millennium, and Baby is on the precipice of major change. Her mother is packing up their home and moving them into a religious community that believes the world is ending. But when Baby begins to have surprising visions of death, she investigates her lineage, piecing together what she can about her father, Chuck, and her family’s deeply shrouded past. These visions, once seen as a curse, become an indelible link to her history—recasting what she thought she understood of love, parentage, and prophecy.

“This Great Hospital Fight” – Dr. Drake

At the height of racial and political tensions in early twentieth-century Houston, two unlikely figures became allies. Dr. William M. Drake, a pioneering surgeon and Black community leader, and Joseph Cullinan, a White oil magnate and founder of the company that became Texaco, united in a desperate effort to save a hospital that symbolized hope. The Houston Negro Hospital was born from America’s Black Hospital Movement. Dedicated Juneteenth 1926, it embodied a bold experiment to bring dignity and healthcare access to a community systematically denied both in the Jim Crow south.

Journalist and storyteller Carlton Houston―whose ancestors played a role in this remarkable heritage―reveals the untold, human drama behind the institution that would become Riverside General. Recount the vision, conflict, and resilience that shaped a century of healthcare through the struggle of those determined to save lives.

This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Nel Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this audacious and darkly funny literary crime masterpiece centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose façade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murder

George Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta’s poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It’s 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described “redneck” who takes Jonson under his wing.

After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he’s still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.
When the white-washed veneer of Jonson’s life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he’s forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.

Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with his trademark virtuosic dissonance, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of corruption and conspiracy in a nation divided.

A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today.

“Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean’s utility to Western Wealth.”
—Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies.

Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.

Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.