80 results for “by diane oliver”

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  • Tumbling: A Novel cover image

    Diane McKinney-Whetstone

    $18.99

    “Warm and intimate. . . . An accomplished novel, with sharply drawn characters, exuberant prose, plenty of period detail and a wise, forgiving outlook on family life.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

    Tumbling is the beloved bestselling debut novel that launched the luminous career of Diane McKinney Whetstone, critically acclaimed author of Tempest Rising, Blues Dancing, Leaving Cecil Street, and Trading Dreams at Midnight. Writing in a style as accessible as Terry McMillan, yet with the literary touches of Toni Morrison, McKinney Whetstone’s Tumbling is a poignant, exquisitely rendered story of the ties that bind us and the secrets that keep us apart.

    Noon and Herbie are deeply in love and living in a tightly knit African American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the 1940s. But their marriage remains unconsummated because of a horrible incident in Noon's past, so each seeks comfort elsewhere: Noon in the warm acceptance of the neighborhood church; Herbie in the arms of Ethel, a jazz singer. Then one day an infant girl is left on their doorstep, and later Ethel blesses them with her five-year-old niece. Suddenly and unexpectedly a family, Herbie, Noon, and their two girls draw closer—until an outside threat reawakens a fire in Noon, causing her to rise up and fight to hold her family and her community together.

  • BLUES DANCING cover image

    Diane Mckinney-Whetstone

    $17.99

    From acclaimed writer Diane McKinney-Whetstone, a richly spun tale of love and passion, betrayal, redemption, and faith, set in contemporary Philadelphia.

    My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you're getting ready to fall in love.

    For the last twenty years, the beautiful Verdi Mae has led a comfortable life with Rowe, the conservative professor who rescued her from addiction when she was an undergrad. But her world is about to shift when the smell of butter lingers in the air and Johnson—the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who pulled her into the fire of passion and all the shadows cast from it—returns to town.

    In "this story of self-discovery that moves seamlessly between the early 1970s and early 1990s" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), McKinney-Whetstone takes readers into a world of erotic love, drugs, and political activism, and beautifully illustrates the struggle to reconcile passion with accountability and the redemptive powers of love's rediscovery.

    This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

  • Plus Size Player (Curve, 2) cover image

    Danielle Allen

    $18.99

    Julie Murphy's If the Shoe Fits meets Talia Hibbert's Take a Hint, Dani Brown―USA Today bestselling author Danielle Allen brings another steamy, witty novel about finding the perfect partner―and how sometimes what you're looking for is right in front of you.

    “I only spend time with people I enjoy. I only do things I want to do. I only have sex with people who get me off. So, my time is never wasted and my energy stays high.”

    Nina Ford doesn’t like to put all her eggs in one basket. She works multiple jobs, she enjoys multiple hobbies, she dates multiple men.

    In her thirty years of life, Nina has never come across a man who has all the things she’s looking for.

    She loves fun and excitement―and she has a man for that.

    She loves confidence and humor―and she has a man for that.

    She loves intelligence and ambition―and she has a man for that.

    She loves passion and romance―and she has a man for that.

    She’s always been content rotating a few men in and out of her life to get her needs met. But when an opportunity presents itself, Nina finds herself in a bit of a predicament. Because if everything she’s ever wanted in a partner collides with everything she’s ever wanted in a career, her eggs are bound to get cracked.

    Like her back.

  • Book cover image

    by Danielle Allen

    $18.99

    Bridget Jones’s Diary meets Survival of the Thickest in Danielle Allen’s CURVY GIRL SUMMER, a smoking-hot, hilarious novel about the perils of online dating.

    “There’s got to be an easier way than dating. I want the shortcut. I just want to find my person and start our lives together.”
    After a one-night stand with her clingy ex, Aaliyah James has an epiphany: this ain’t it. She knows what she wants, and she’s ready to move past casual hookups, flings, and situationships.

    But for her family, the clock is ticking―after all, she’s almost thirty. And when they imply that her personality (and her body) might be too big to land a man, she lets them know they’ve gone too far―and her (nonexistent) man loves her curves, thank you very much. Now, she has seven weeks to find the perfect boyfriend to rub in their faces at the big, fancy birthday celebration she’s been planning.

    After her first blind date goes wrong, charming local bartender Ahmad Williamson consoles her with a drink and some playful banter. Aaliyah takes him up on his suggestion to use a dating app―but the more she sees of his warm, funny, and easygoing nature, the less she wants to check her DMs. Will her next swipe bring her closer to true love―or is her real match closer than she thinks?

  • Family Spirit : A Novel

    Diane McKinney-Whetstone

    $26.99

    The eccentric Mace family believes that the Philadelphia rowhouse they’ve lived in for decades is built on sacred ground, and that the space enhances the clairvoyance passed down to them through generations. But developers, viewing the family’s lifestyle an impediment to gentrification efforts, begin a campaign to displace them. Meanwhile, a prodigal daughter’s return deepens family schisms and exposes betrayals. Can she also help them battle the havoc, both internal and external, that would ruin them?

    The Maces believe that a clairvoyant gene, they refer to as the knowing, has been passed down in their family to at least one girl child in every generation from as far back as they can trace—they claim Harriet Tubman in their family tree. Main character Lil, considered the most gifted of her generation, has returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment. Lil is painfully estranged from her mother and aunts and cousins. Decades ago, after too much brandy and cocaine, Lil acquiesces to her boyfriends’ request to prove her clairvoyance by advising him on a business venture. Doing so, Lil violates a sacred family code because the Maces believe a knowing is an act of community where they agree through storytelling and rituals that invoke the ancestors, that their prognostications contribute to a greater good. Lil’s boyfriend benefits from her breach of faith and in an act of gratitude—and exploitation—books Lil on the Mike Douglass show. Lil’s mother and grandmother are mortified as they watch Lil predict trivialities in a game-like format for some fawning white man, making a mockery of their sacrosanct practice. They sever all contact with Lil and ban her from the family home.

    Lil becomes a media darling for a time after her appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, and since then has been paid handsomely as a consultant, advisor, counselor, coach, or similar titles that legitimate entities use to obscure that they’re paying for fortunetelling.

    Lil has remained close with her brother Miles and when she returns to Philadelphia, settles into the chaos of his household. Miles is an aspiring novelist in search of a book deal; Mile’s wife Jetta, a once local model, is now trying her hand at interior decorating. Jetta and Miles are teetertottering on Bankruptcy, their marriage is disintegrating, and they can’t agree on how to help their twenty-one-year-old daughter Ayana work through her issues. Lil offers Miles and Jetta money and advice, but she primarily concentrates on Ayana in whom she recognizes her younger self.

    Ayana is back home with her parents following an abysmal six years trying to finish college. After a dearth of girl babies on her father’s side, she feels pressured to manifest and carry on the family gift. She’s conflicted. Her entire life, her mother, who doesn’t believe in a clairvoyant gene, has tried to persuade Ayana that she is not like the Maces. Though Ayana craves a normal life and wishes Jetta was right, she knows that she is very much like her father’s people. Plus, she adores them with their unapologetic authenticity, and color-clashing outfits, and free-standing crinkly hair.  She loves the stories her grandmother tells about the ancestors, bringing them to life. She especially loves the rituals.

    Still, Ayana pretends to her family that the knowing gene has bypassed her, disappointing her grandmother and aunts, greatly relieving her mother, and causing Ayana enormous guilt. She distracts herself from the guilt by jumping in and out of relationships. Her latest guy lives in his car.

    More complications arise for Ayana when she thinks she experiences a knowing about Lil’s treatment and doesn’t want to out herself by exposing it.

    Meanwhile, the man who exploited Lil years ago has also returned to Philly after a lucrative run as a Black man purveying anti-Black rhetoric. He again contacts Lil for help. As appalled as she is by his brazenness, she considers his appeal an opportunity to right her past wrong and pave a way back home to her mother. She tussles with whether and how to bring him down as she prepares to start her cancer treatment. Ayana begs her to get a second opinion, and Lil relents and discovers the radiologist’s error, and Ayana’s deceit.

    Ayana’s unhoused boyfriend learns through his internship with a gentrifying housing development corporation that a campaign is underway to remove Ayana’s grandmother, aunts, and cousins from the home they’ve occupied for decades. The threat fuels the internal struggles of the main characters. Ayana, just trying to live a normal life, and Lil, just trying to keep living, become a formidable duo in the climactic battle to save the family home, their block, their culture, and their traditions.

    Each chapter of Family Spirit opens with a text message thread that captures the chapter’s focus—hence the title Family Spirit. Told in an omniscient voice, and primarily set in the current day, Family Spirit dips into the past with depictions of enslaved ancestors through the stories Ayana’s grandmother tells.

  • A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

    by Tia Williams

    $17.99
    From the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Days in June, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is an epic love story one hundred years in the making…

    Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

    Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

    When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

    One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.  

    Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked. 

  • The People Could Fly: The Picture Book cover image

    Virginia Hamilton

    from $14.99

    “THE PEOPLE COULD FLY,” the title story in Virginia Hamilton’s prize-winning American Black folktale collection, is a fantasy tale of the slaves who possessed the ancient magic words that enabled them to literally fly away to freedom. And it is a moving tale of those who did not have the opportunity to “fly” away, who remained slaves with only their imaginations to set them free as they told and retold this tale.

    Leo and Diane Dillon have created powerful new illustrations in full color for every page of this picture book presentation of Virginia Hamilton’s most beloved tale. The author’s original historical note as well as her previously unpublished notes are included.

    Awards for The People Could Fly collection:

    A Coretta Scott King Award

    A Booklist Children’s Editors’ Choice

    A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year

    A Horn Book Fanfare

    An ALA Notable Book

    An NCTE Teachers’ Choice

    A New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year

    A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Century

  • Super Sad Black Girl by Diamond Sharp
    $17.00

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    In her brilliant debut collection of poetry, Diamond Sharp navigates questions of mental health, grief, and joy through her speaker’s sardonic and playful imagination.

    Diamond Sharp’s Super Sad Black Girl is a love letter to her hometown of Chicago, where the speaker finds solace and community with her literary idols in hopes of answering the question: What does it look like when Black women are free? 

    Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks appear throughout these poems, counseling the speaker as she navigates her own depression and exploratory questions about the “Other Side,” as do Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and other Black women who have been murdered by police. 

    Sharp’s poetry is self-assured, playful, and imaginative, reminiscent of Langston Hughes with its precision and brevity. The book explores purgatorial, in-between spaces that the speaker occupies as she struggles to find a place and time where she can live safely and freely. With her skillful use of repetition, particularly in her series of concrete poems, lines and voices echo across the book so the reader, too, feels suspended within Sharp’s lyric moments. Super Sad Black Girl is a compassionate and ethereal depiction of mental illness from a promising and powerful poet.

  • Finding Me: A Memoir

    by Viola Davis

    $17.99

    OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK 2022

    Finding Me is Viola Davis’ story, in her own words, and spans her incredible, inspiring life, from her coming-of-age in Rhode Island to her present day. Hers is a story of overcoming, a true hero’s journey. Deeply personal, brutally honest, and riveting, Finding Me is a timeless and spellbinding memoir that will capture hearts and minds around the globe.  

  • Book cover image

    Walter Mosley

    from $19.99

    Paperback Release: January 27, 2026

    In the latest from “mystery master” Walter Mosley, a family member’s terminal illness leads P.I. Joe King Oliver to the investigation of his life: tracking down his long-lost father, and meanwhile, a new case pits King’s professional responsibility against his own moral code. (TheWashington Post)

    Joe King Oliver’s beloved Grandma B has found a tumor, and at her age, treatment is high-risk. She’s lived life fully and without regrets, and now has only a single, dying wish: to see her long-lost son. King has been estranged from his father, Chief Odin Oliver, since he was a young boy. He swore to never speak to the man again when he was taken away in handcuffs. But now, Grandma B’s pure ask has opened King’s heart, and through his hunt, he gains a deeper understanding of his father as a complicated, righteous man—a man defined by women, a man protected by women, a man he wants to know. Although Chief was released from prison years ago, he’s been living underground ever since. Now, King must not only find his father, but prove his innocence, and protect the future of his entire family.

    Simultaneously, King finds himself in a moral bind. Marigold Hart, the wife of a powerful Californian billionaire, has gone missing, along with their seven-year-old daughter. Orr is brutish and dangerous, and King realizes after locating her that it’s in her best interest to stay hidden. But are his motives pure? There is something magnetic about Marigold; he can’t help but want her near.  

    In the latest installment in the Joe King Oliver series, no good deed goes unpunished. Emotionally stirring, pulse-pounding, and undeniably sexy, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right shows Walter Mosley at his best.

  • A Love Worth Forever cover image
    $18.95

    Grieving and starting over, a marketing research manager finds herself drawn to the one man she shouldn’t want in this soul-stirring, unconventional romance by BriAnn Danae.

    Shyriq Hendrix is no stranger to success. As the heir to a legacy distillery and a man with wealth, status, and discipline, he’s built a life most would envy. But in the quiet moments when he’s not managing his multimillion-dollar empire, he’s aware that something is missing.

    Then Nhuri Coleman steps into his life . . .

    Nhuri has her reasons for keeping a low profile after relocating to Kansas City for a reset. After a chance encounter with Shyriq—the reserved but undeniably attractive owner of Great Hendrix Distillery—she accepts a job she hadn’t been pursuing, offered by a man who sees her worth before she’s ready to believe in it herself. She only expects a steady check and quiet routine, but instead, she experiences undeniable soul-stirring chemistry.

    Their early exchanges are strictly professional. But how he watches, listens, and shows up without expectation catches her off guard. Just as their connection begins to deepen, the sudden appearance of her ex-boyfriend pulls Nhuri back into the past. Shyriq, not one to chase, finds himself wanting more than just her time—he wants her trust. And he learns quickly that loving someone who’s learned to survive alone isn’t about fixing them. It’s about staying when everything else says leave.

  • Seven Days in June

    by Tia Williams

    $17.99

    Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York.

    When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry-or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.

    Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered. . .

    With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.

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