It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written with the perspective of white men at the forefront. It could even be said that the historical devaluation and elimination of the experiences of Black people is as American as apple pie. Or rioting after football games. Or calling the cops on Black Americans for walking around their own neighborhoods, or listening to music, or bird-watching, or any other normal everyday activity.

Hit the ground running with all five books in Jason Reynolds’s award-winning and New York Times bestselling Track series, now available together in one paperback boxed set.

Ghost. Patina. Sunny. Lu. A fast and fiery group of kids from wildly different backgrounds, chosen to compete on an elite track team. They all have a lot to lose, a lot to gain, and, most of all, a lot to prove, not only to each other, but to themselves. Under the caring yet firm-handed guidance of their coach, however, they may achieve more than they ever dreamed possible.

Here are all their stories, even Coach’s from when he was a boy coming into his own as a track superstar, in this explosive five-book series.

This paperback boxed set includes:
Ghost
Patina
Sunny
Lu
Coach

The new novel from acclaimed, three-time instant #1 New York Times–bestselling author Tomi Adeyemi blends shocking contemporary storytelling with a sinister dark academic flair to create a blockbuster about rage, longing, and a woman’s darkness that will leave readers breathless.

When Emery steps foot onto Dartmouth’s campus, she knows what she has to do: keep her scholarship, take her meds, and pray no one ever finds out about the past she left behind.

But that all changes when Emery meets an intoxicating girl named Roux, her disarming stepbrother named Eli, and the mystical band of girls Roux calls “The Sirens.” Each Siren is as beautiful as the last, and their lives on campus are shrouded in extravagance and secret parties. Before the girls became Sirens, they were outcasts, yet under Roux, their wildest dreams come true. When Roux offers Emery the chance to join them, Emery will do whatever it takes to make it in.

Even if it costs Emery her life.

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view • From the “literary icon” (Oprah Daily) and Pulitzer Prize Finalist whose novel Erasure is the basis for Cord Jefferson’s critically acclaimed film American Fiction When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

Lovie Sinclair is on the run.

After narrowly escaping a volatile relationship, the former NFL WAG is a shell of herself. Her once glamorous life feels like a bad dream. Emotionally numb, broke, and desperate to disappear, she returns home to heal, but something about home feels different. She just can’t put her finger on what’s changed.

Then she meets Rich Lovelace.

Insular and intimidating, Rich is the embodiment of danger. He doesn’t know how to run from anything or anyone. Born into a family of rugged street fighters, he confronts all of his problems head on—well, all except for one.

When Rich catches Lovie in a compromising position, the two clash in an intense encounter. Afterwards, everything about Rich that should scare Lovie piques her curiosity, while everything Rich likes about Lovie keeps him holding her at arm’s length. Eventually, they find themselves tangled in a fiery, forbidden friendship that snowballs into a passionate love affair.

Together, they’re pulled into a dangerous web of lust, secrets, and extortion that threatens to shatter Lovie’s fragile healing journey and force Rich to confront the one problem he can’t fight. But when desire collides with danger, someone always pays a price.

The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.

The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years—the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife—who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by sudden bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife. And there is a visitor among them—a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servant’s dazzling niece, but the protegée and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film and art.

Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian’s perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret’s delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him—he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood; uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege.

As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward—to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them—she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him—all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.

Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.

*Paperback Release Date - 2/2/2027*

A dark, bloody epic fantasy reimagining of The Little Mermaid that goes far beyond the fairy tale to explore family legacy, war, and what we will sacrifice for vengeance—the perfect read for fans of The Priory of the Orange Tree and Circe.

The fairy tale mermaid Arielle might have gotten her happily-ever-after, but her granddaughter Yemi is having a much harder time. Her father, the king of Ixia, was assassinated years ago, her mother is slowly dying of a poisoned wound, and she faces whispers and slights from her own people. Yemi has been raised as the shield of the kingdom and is soon to inherit the throne, but she cannot shake her fury at how Ixia has treated her family after all they’ve sacrificed. Only her patient mother and steadfast personal bodyguard (and fiancée), Nova, help Yemi rein in that fury...most of the time.

When the kingdom’s discontented rumblings reach a fever pitch, a coup erupts and Yemi’s throne is usurped, stripping her of her family and forcing her into exile. Now, only one being has the power to help her: Ursla.

Like her grandmother before her, Yemi is tempted by a deal with the sea-witch. With powerful and ancient magic behind her, Yemi could avenge her family, take back her throne, and protect the love of her life. But she should know more than anyone that there is always a price. As much as Yemi wants vengeance, Ursla has been waiting a very, very long time for her own—and it may take more fortune than Yemi possesses to keep her from losing everything all over again.

The Hate U Give is a groundbreaking, thought-provoking debut novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, about a teen girl who is the only witness to her friend’s fatal shooting by a police officer.

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor black 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, Khalil’s death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Starr’s best friend at school suggests he may have had it coming. When it becomes clear the police have little interest in investigating the incident, protesters take to the streets and Starr’s neighborhood becomes a war zone. 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 destroy her community. It could also endanger her life.

A. C. Thomas’s searing debut about an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances addresses issues of racism and police violence with intelligence, heart, and unflinching honesty.

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family―and the family business―together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.

Mississippi, 1927. The groanings are coming.

No town is perfect, but East Cobb comes close. It’s a wealthy all-Black Free Town―untouched by white oppression―where ambitious Thea Elliot and her husband plan to make good on their big dreams. Little do they know that the idyllic town teems with ghoulish, walking nightmares . . . that only the women can see.

Marah knows the groanings well. She is one of the carriers―women with the ability to pull traumatic memories from men. Populated by men entirely freed of their pain, East Cobb has flourished, even as the remnants of their memories haunt the town’s women. When an unexpected death drives Marah to discover more about her own power, Thea’s and Marah’s worlds collide. The sisters must confront the rotten core at the heart of East Cobb’s prosperity and choose what―and who―will survive the reckoning.

A gripping blend of historical fiction and Southern gothic psychological horror, Our Sister’s Keeper is a fierce exploration of Black sisterhood, rage, and resistance.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless―or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale comes a remarkable, career-spanning collection of short fiction and essays about love, aging, culture and all the things in between.

For the first time, a single volume brings together renowned author Terry McMillan’s previously published short fiction and nonfiction pieces, as well as never-before-seen works.

Before McMillan found success as a novelist in the early 1990s, she published provocative, boundary-pushing short stories, capturing the struggles and triumphs of Black life in America with vitality and honesty, from the workaday factory man’s malaise in “The End” to the cast-aside lover’s resolve in “Touching” to the elderly woman’s wiles in “Ma’Dear.” McMillan’s inimitable voice bravely explores the dark corners of human relationships with compassion, humor, and nuance. This collection also features five unpublished stories that reveal how she wrestled with controversial topics rarely addressed in short fiction, from domestic abuse in “Mama, Take Another Step” to extreme poverty in “Can’t Close My Eyes to It.”

Whether she’s revealing life lessons, pontificating about aging, recalling her sources of inspiration, or laying bare the beginnings of her life as a writer, McMillan approaches every piece with enduring candor, wit, and fearlessness.

Devoted fans and new readers alike will be delighted to discover these treasures spanning McMillan’s long, groundbreaking career. Indeed, it wasn’t only what Terry McMillan has said that made her so beloved . . . it was the way she said it.