A gripping novel about two trailblazing women on opposite sides of the law—a prosecutor and a madam—who team up to bring down notorious Mob boss Lucky Luciano in 1930s New York, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the million-copy bestseller The Personal Librarian.

Eunice Carter, assistant district attorney for the City of New York and Manhattan’s first Black female prosecutor, has her sights set on the one and only Lucky Luciano, head of New York City’s five largest organized crime families. Other prosectors have tried to bring down Lucky, but they’ve all focused on the crime syndicate’s traditional businesses—bootlegging, gambling, loan sharking, and drug dealing—or tax evasion. No one has thought to approach the mob through its role in prostitution. Until Eunice. But she can’t get Luciano alone.

Polly Adler has worked long and hard to build up her high-class brothel business. Her client list is filled with well-known names, both the famous and the infamous, who all know her booze is top-notch, her music first-rate, her food exquisite, and her girls the best. But Lucky has gone too far, putting her girls in danger, and Polly finally sees the chance to end his reign once and for all.

Together, Eunice and Polly fashion a case utilizing a network of women. Bridging the enormous divide between them and risking their own lives, they assemble evidence bit by bit, under the nose of the man they’re trying to convict. It is this very alliance—of two women from vastly different worlds—that launches the most sensational trial New York City has ever seen.

When Drew Honey moved into a shared house with 5 other girls, all she wanted was to get through her last semester of college and start living the life she always dreamed of. However, the universe had other plans when a charismatic and kind-hearted woman named Adrian Jackson slid her way into the picture.

From that first day, the two of them were drawn to each other, easily becoming closer as the months passed. Their feelings grew and as graduation approached, they both decided to confess to each other, but of course, the universe once again threw them a curveball. Because of this, they both reluctantly went their separate ways after graduation, clinging to the hope that they’d one day be reunited.

Fast forward 5 years later, Adrian finally relocates back to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The city where she spent 4 years of her life. The city where she met the only woman she ever loved. The city where she had to let that woman go.

She never planned to run into her again, but when a random trip to a clothing store brings these two lovers back together, they realize that the universe has given them yet another chance, so they take it.

This story is full of love, but also full of grief. With past traumas and anxieties starting to rear their nasty heads, these two realize that the only thing that can help them heal is each other. Thus a love that is sweet like honey starts to blossom.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water comes a gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to escape a former master still intent on their bondage.

New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the postbellum South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return.
 
When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June’s tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman’s journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper's daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who'll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they're owed. As Coleman and June separately navigate a perilous, parched landscape, the siblings learn quickly that freedom isn't always given—sometimes, it must be taken by force.
 
As in his New York Times bestselling debut The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris delves into the critical years of the Civil War’s aftermath to deliver an intimate and epic tale of what freedom means in a society still determined to return its Black citizens to bondage. Populated with unforgettable characters, Amity is a vital addition to the literature of emancipation.

From Whiting Award–winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love

When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.

Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”

In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.

*Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

From the Desk of Zoe Washington meets Lupe Wong Won't Dance in Sincerely Sicily, a debut middle grade by Tamika Burgess that follows Sicily Jordan as she learns to use her voice and find joy in who she is—a Black Panamanian fashionista who rocks her braids with pride—while confronting prejudice both in the classroom and at home.

Sicily Jordan’s worst nightmare has come true! She’s been enrolled in a new school, with zero of her friends and stuck wearing a fashion catastrophe of a uniform. But however bad Sicily thought sixth grade was going to be, it only gets worse when she does her class presentation.

While all her classmates breezed through theirs, Sicily is bombarded with questions on how she can be both Black and Panamanian. She wants people to understand, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is ready to listen—first at school and then at home. Because when her abuela starts talking mess about her braids, Sicily’s the only one whose heart is being crumpled for a second time.

Staying quiet may no longer be an option, but that doesn’t mean Sicily has the words to show the world just what it means to be a proud Black Panamanian either. Even though she hasn’t written in her journal since her abuelo passed, it’s time to pick up her pen again—but will it be enough to prove to herself and everyone else exactly who she is?

Sincerely Sicily is a captivating and empowering story about learning to use your voice and taking pride in who you are, from debut author Tamika Burgess.

*ships/ready for pick-up in 7-10 business days*

World Fantasy Award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor weaves together a story of magic, mystery, and finding one’s place in the world—for fans of Ursula Le Guin and Diana Wynne Jones.

Twelve-year-old Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born American. Her features are African, but she’s albino. She’s a terrific athlete, but can’t go out into the sun to play soccer. There seems to be no place where she fits. And then she discovers something amazing-she is a “free agent,” with latent magical power. Soon she’s part of a quartet of magic students, studying the visible and invisible, learning to change reality. But will it be enough to help them when they are asked to catch a career criminal who knows magic too?

Fifteen years after his career-defining case against Cole Oil, Jay Porter is broke and tired. That victory might have won the environmental lawyer fame, but thanks to a string of appeals, he hasn’t seen a dime. His latest case—representing Pleasantville in the wake of a chemical fire—is dragging on, shaking his confidence and raising doubts about him within this upwardly mobile black community on Houston’s north side. Though Jay still believes in doing what’s right, he is done fighting other people’s battles. Once he has his piece of the settlement, the single father is going to devote himself to what matters most-his children.

His plans are abruptly derailed when a female campaign volunteer vanishes on the night of Houston’s mayoral election, throwing an already contentious campaign into chaos. The accused is none other than the nephew and campaign manager of one of the leading candidates—a scion of a prominent Houston family headed by the formidable Sam Hathorne. Despite all the signs suggesting that his client is guilty—and his own misgivings—Jay can’t refuse when a man as wealthy and connected as Sam asks him to head up the defense. Not if he wants that new life with his kids. But he has to win.

Plunging into a shadowy world of ambitious enemies and treacherous allies armed with money, lies, and secrets, Jay reluctantly takes on his first murder trial—a case that will put him and his client, and an entire political process, on trial.

Celebrate the final installment of Attica Locke's Highway 59 Series, Guide Me Home! 

EVENT DEETS

When: Wednesday, September 11, 2024 @ 7 PM

Where: Holy Family HTX (3719 Navigation Blvd, HTX, 77004) 

How: RSVP ONLY to reserve your seat or RSVP WITH BOOK to support Attica Locke and the bookstore! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Attica Locke is a NY Times best-selling author of six novels, including Guide Me Home.  She is also a winner of an Edgar Award and the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and she has been short listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and nominated for an LA Times Book Prize and an NAACP Image award for her work as a novelist. Locke is also a screenwriter and TV producer, with credits that include Empire, When They See Us and the Emmy-nominated Little Fires Everywhere, for which she won an NAACP Image award for television writing. She co-created and executive produced an adaptation of her sister Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home for Netflix. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

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.

An in-depth look at the innovative career of an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of colonial and postcolonial power
 
For the past thirty years, Guyanese British artist Hew Locke (b. 1959) has used strategies of appropriation to reveal and upend the visual codes of imperialism. Incorporating sculpture, photography, drawing, and found objects, Locke’s oeuvre has been described as a “postcolonial baroque” that deconstructs and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty. This richly illustrated catalogue showcases the full spectrum of Locke’s practice, bringing together distinct bodies of work that scrutinize the visual language of empire and colonialism’s present-day legacies of global market capitalism, migration, and diaspora. Essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary art situate Locke’s work within the context of colonial and postcolonial history and theory, reveal how his use of nontraditional materials―including cardboard, fabric, beads, sequins, and readymade toys―enables the artist to reflect on his Guyanese-British heritage, and consider how the artist’s dense, highly textured, and multilayered works fuse vernacular and formal traditions.
 
Published by the Yale Center for British Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
Yale Center for British Art
(October 2, 2025–January 11, 2026)
 
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
(February 13–May 24, 2026)
 
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(June 21–September 13, 2026)

*Paperback Release Date - 8/18/26*

In this taut Southern family drama, the sins of a favorite son rock a small Mississippi town.

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, shepherd of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. Besides the barbershop and radio station he owns, he has an iron hand on every aspect of Dominion, Mississippi, society. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy―no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. After a surprising encounter with a stranger, Wonderboy finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined, and his response will send shockwaves through the entire community. Told from the point of view of the women who love these two men, Dominion illustrates how we enable the everyday violence and casual sins of the patriarchy.

A Black Southern family drama that deals as much in tenderness and humor as it does in brutality, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion reveals the many sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy.