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In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe.  None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.  As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death.  

Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.  Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde's homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.

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The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing, fed by the wealth of its noblemen and the power of its warriors. The people of Segu, the Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests; their lives are ruled by the elements. But even their soothsayers can only hint at the changes to come, for the battle of the soul of Africa has begun. From the east comes a new religion, Islam, and from the West, the slave trade.

Segu follows the life of Dousika Traore, the king’s most trusted advisor, and his four sons, whose fates embody the forces tearing at the fabric of the nation. There is Tiekoro, who renounces his people’s religion and embraces Islam; Siga, who defends tradition, but becomes a merchant; Naba, who is kidnapped by slave traders; and Malobali, who becomes a mercenary and halfhearted Christian.

Based on actual events, Segu transports the reader to a fascinating time in history, capturing the earthy spirituality, religious fervor, and violent nature of a people and a growing nation trying to cope with jihads, national rivalries, racism, amid the vagaries of commerce.

Dominique Morisseau’s most radical play yet follows two Black women living more than a century apart as they struggle to define freedom for themselves.

Confederates tells the story of two women in what at first appear to be radically different circumstances. Sara is an enslaved rebel ferrying information from the plantation to Union soldiers. Sandra is a political science professor fighting the patriarchy at a predominantly white university. As the play progresses, the line between the past and present blurs, raising questions about how far we have come since 1865—and how far we still have to go.

In Morisseau’s words, "I don’t believe in the inhumanity of the enslaved." This play delves into serious themes with a satirical tone, juxtaposing humor and sexuality alongside pain and struggle. Confederates is an ambitious work by one of America’s most exciting playwrights.

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever.

Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankensteinand The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.

Set in a wonderfully reimagined 15th century West Africa, Masquerade is a dazzling, lyrical tale exploring the true cost of one woman’s fight for freedom and self-discovery, and the lengths she’ll go to secure her future.

“Sangoyomi delivers an incisive examination of gender, temptation, and the lengths people will go to hold power―a magnificent debut!” ―Vaishnavi Patel, New York Times bestselling author of Kaikeyi

Òdòdó’s hometown of Timbuktu has been conquered by the warrior king of Yorùbáland. Already shunned as social pariahs, living conditions for Òdòdó and the other women in her blacksmith guild grow even worse under Yorùbá rule.

Then Òdòdó is abducted. She is whisked across the Sahara to the capital city of Ṣàngótẹ̀, where she is shocked to discover that her kidnapper is none other than the vagrant who had visited her guild just days prior. But now that he is swathed in riches rather than rags, Òdòdó realizes he is not a vagrant at all; he is the warrior king, and he has chosen her to be his wife.

In a sudden change of fortune, Òdòdó soars to the very heights of society. But after a lifetime of subjugation, the power that saturates this world of battle and political savvy becomes too enticing to resist. As tensions with rival states grow, revealing elaborate schemes and enemies hidden in plain sight, Òdòdó must defy the cruel king she has been forced to wed by re-forging the shaky loyalties of the court in her favor, or risk losing everything―including her life.

Loosely based on the myth of Persephone, O.O. Sangoyomi’s Masquerade takes you on a journey of epic power struggles and political intrigue which turn an entire region on its head.

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Stunning for her daring originality, the author of Negroland gives us what she calls “a temperamental autobiography,” comprised of visceral, intimate fragments that fuse criticism and memoir.

Margo Jefferson constructs a nervous system with pieces of different lengths and tone, conjoining arts writing (poem, song, performance) with life writing (history, psychology). The book’s structure is determined by signal moments of her life, those that trouble her as well as those that thrill and restore. In this nervous system:
  •  The sounds of a black spinning disc of a 1950s jazz LP as intimate and instructive as a parent’s voice.
  •  The muscles and movements of a ballerina, spliced with those of an Olympic runner: template for what a female body could be.
  •  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy finds her way into the art of Kara Walker and the songs of Cécile McLorin Salvant.
  •  Bing Crosby and Ike Turner become alter egos.
  •  W. E. B. DuBois and George Eliot meet illicitly, as he appropriates lines from her story The Lifted Veil to write his famous “behind the veil” passages in The Souls of Black Folk.
  •  The words of multiple others (writers, singers, film characters, friends, family) act as prompts and as dialogue.
 
The fragments of this brilliant book, while not neglecting family, race, and class, are informed by a kind of aesthetic drive: longing, ecstasy, or even acute ambivalence. Constructing a nervous system is Jefferson’s relentlessly galvanizing mise-en-scène for unconventional storytelling as well as a platform for unexpected dramatis personae.

Mara Brock Akil, the award-winning creator of Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane, Love Is, and Forever, pens an emotionally enthralling debut novel about enduring love, world-shattering secrets, and self-awakening.

What happens when one knock at your door sends your entire world into chaos? When a stranger becomes a lifeline? When the reality you’ve meticulously curated seems to be a mirage?

From the outside looking in, one might say that Dionne Daphne had it all: being the beauty editor at a prestigious New York magazine, a boyfriend who could have been plucked out of its model pages, the social life of the upper echelon, and a girlhood steeped in debutant balls.

But that is from the outside. When the now ex-boyfriend arrives at her Brooklyn doorstep Dionne imagines reconciliation, going back to the good life brimming with the possibility of marriage; the life her mother always wanted for her. Instead, he delivers life-threatening news that creates a crack in her picture-perfect world. A crack that grows legs and runs her right into her past, unearthing a secret that she has hidden since childhood.

In an effort to run toward the truth and away from a lie, Dionne sets out on a spur-of-the-moment road trip with an unlikely stranger to confront the long-buried darkness of her past and the family who made it so. As Dionne comes to a final reckoning, she begins to unravel new layers of herself and fresh possibilities for her life, her family, and even her love.

The Revelation of Dionne Daphne is at once a deeply moving and provocatively gripping novel that shows when you dig deep enough into the shadows of your life, light can be revealed. It’s a novel of broken lovers, a fractured family, and distant friendships all making their way back to one another.

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The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.

A Penguin Classic

Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers--collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms "an amputated man." Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay's novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the "stowaway era" of black cultural politics and McKay's challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.

Camille has worked her way up from the Guadeluopean lakou where she was born and raised to the heights of Orlando, where she is a successful motivational speaker. Her assistant, Evelyn, is struggling as a single mother, especially since she has been keeping the existence of her son a secret from her family in Jamaica. As Camille relates the story of her life to Evelyn, she urges Evelyn to see her difficult life as one of great fortune—“My girl, a woman falls, but she never despairs”—and to fully share her joys and successes with her loved ones.

Camille’s Lakou tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single‑parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe‑à‑Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Author Marie Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming‑of‑age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz‑Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromane from the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakou shifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood.

In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée’s Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time.

*Paperback Release Date - 6/23/2026*

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.