The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.

The anticipated sequel to the instant New York Times bestseller featuring escapist romance and a wealthy Black family in 1910s Chicago

Like the blazing Chicago sun, the drama is heating up for the Davenports and their social set. Before the summer of 1910 drops its last petal, the lives—and loves—of these four young women will change in ways they never could have imagined:

Newly engaged Ruby Tremaine is eagerly planning her wedding to the love of her life when a nasty rumor threatens her reputation and her marriage. Olivia Davenporthas committed to the social justice cause and secretly hopes she’ll be reunited with dashing lawyer Washington DeWight—until her parents decide she’s to marry someone else. Amy-Rose Shepherd is making her lifelong wish of owning a salon come true, but when an incident forces her to return to Freeport Manor, she’s back in the path of John Davenport, who still holds her heart. Helen Davenport is determined to get over her own heartbreak and bring the Davenport Carriage Company into the new century, even if it means teaming up with a thrill-seeking racecar driver who just loves to get under her skin.

Inspired by the real-life story of the Patterson family, More Than This is the second book in critically adored Davenports series, following four empowered and passionate young Black women as they navigate a rapidly changing society and discover the courage to steer their own paths in life—and love.

A young woman discovers that dancers at a local discotheque are being driven to acts of insane violence.

“The place was full of swarming, pugnacious, dangerous missellneous reptile’s… Teenager’s everywhere pounded their way on top of each other crazily strangling, biting and slashing each other’s with broken glass, smashed records or sharpened blades… ”

16-year-old Jennifer Gibbons (1963–1993) wrote Discomania in 1980, alongside her twin sister June-Alison, who was also writing her own novel, The Pepsi Cola Addict, in the bedroom that they shared.

Jennifer offered Discomania to the same English vanity press who would publish June-Alison’s book, but Discomania was turned down for being “too violent, too sexual, and too futuristic.”

Long thought to have been lost or destroyed, June-Alison had in fact preserved the typescript of this unique, furious, funny, and strange novel, which we present with her blessing, alongside additional texts from June-Alison, and editors David Tibet and Ania Goszczyńska.

Embrace and learn to love your natural hair with this eye-opening guide from “hair whisperer” to the stars, Felicia Leatherwood.

As a child there was nothing Felicia Leatherwood wanted more than long, flowy hair. But Felicia’s short afro grew up and out, not down. Her father who styled Felicia’s hair in her mother’s place, often didn’t know his own strength, and would rip Felicia’s delicate strands as he combed through her hair. At a young age, Felicia internalizes her hair as something to be managed, tamed, instead of a source of pride.

As hair trends come and go, Felicia’s beloved Jherri curl is replaced by every braided style in the book. She even tries her hand at weaves and relaxers. Felicia finds she loves doing hair so much she leaves her high-paying corporate job to enroll in beauty school and lands a hot new job at a salon where celebrities breeze through to freshen up their look. It isn’t long until Felicia is styling her first celebrity client. Felicia’s love of hair takes her around the world, to movie sets and several red carpets.

In Root Therapy, Felicia shares her journey of hair positivity, which opens the door to a beautiful spiritual journey of self-love. As a celebrity stylist and natural hair educator, Felicia has made it her life’s mission to share the message of hair acceptance. Complete with exercises that show you the merits of owning one’s complete self, Felicia encourages you to embrace your natural hair.

Bestselling authors Christine Pride and Jo Piazza return with a gripping and thought-provoking new novel about a Black woman whose interracial marriage is tested when a journalist investigates a decades-old murder tied to her wealthy husband’s family.

Simone Hartwell has made trade-offs to build a life she loves, including giving up her once promising career as a journalist. But as her husband, Alex, stands to finally take the reins of the family business—a chain of high-end grocery stores his grandfather started—Simone vows to settle contently into her role supporting him and raising their son Langston.

But when her college ex and first love, Kwame, resurfaces in her life, her carefully constructed domestic bliss threatens to crumble under the weight of old feelings and new dramas. Kwame, who built the journalism career Simone once dreamed of, is investigating a decade’s old mystery of a young Black man who disappeared from The Tate School—the same elite prep school that Alex’s family has attended for generations. When he discovers a startling connection to the Hartwells, it sets everyone on a collision course that will unearth long-held secrets, test loyalties, and force a major reckoning between the past and the future.

Thorny, urgent, and nuanced, I Never Knew You at All is a story of love, forgiveness, and redemption that asks provocative questions: Who deserves forgiveness? Can people really change? And ultimately—what does it take to hold a marriage together…or break it apart?

Featuring a new original introduction by Opal Palmer Adisa

Avey Johnson--a Black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls--has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel--and in a panic packs her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed. Originally published in 1983, Praisesong for the Widow was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and is presented here in a beautiful new hardcover edition as the second title in McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series.

"Astonishingly moving."
-Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

About Of the Diaspora
McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life. Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil.

In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award.

“A story that will slam the power of poetry and love back into your heart.” —Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak and Chains

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. The Poet X is the astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.

But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.

Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.

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.

In this vibrant, gratifying novel, a pious, small-town teenager travels to Atlanta to get an abortion and finds herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black people.
 
“Bursting with heart and humor, These Heathens reflects powerfully on choice and chance, while also being endlessly entertaining.”—Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep and Home of the American Circus

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit: celebrities whom Doris has seen in the pages of Jet and Ebony, civil rights leaders such as Coretta Scott King and Diane Nash, women who dance close together, boys who flirt too hard and talk too much, atheists! And even more shocking? Mrs. Lucas seems right at home.

From the guests at a queer kickback to the student activists at a SNCC conference, Doris suddenly finds herself surrounded by so many people who seem to know exactly who or what they want. Doris knows she doesn’t want a baby, but what does she want? Will this trip help her find out?

These Heathens is a funny, poignant story about Black women’s obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

A sweeping narrative of the unique beauty and trials of Black matriarchy in America that weaves a sharp, tender examination of three single Black mothers—the author's grandmother, mother, and the author herself—with stories of influential Black women in our culture

"Bonét tells the whole history of this country through the relationships of and between Black mothers and daughters."—Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America

“Bonét dances on our hearts in this classic creation of will and wit. Electrifying... Wow.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

Betty Jean, the author’s grandmother, had a house along a bayou in Texas, a home paid for and run without a man by her side. This home served as the center of Bonét’s family’s universe, the one place that was a constant through all of life’s changes.

Mama Connie, one of Betty Jean’s eleven children, vowed that her life would be different. And in many ways it was: she got married, lived in suburbia, and built a life resembling the American dream. But when it came to raising children of her own, she was more like Betty Jean than she cared to admit. But, like her mother before her, Connie’s sweat was the founding salt of her own universe.

Today, Sasha Bonét navigates all aspects of being a mother—escape, promise, burden, assent, and rebellion—not just for the women in her family who came before her, but for Black women with whom society is acquainted, too: figures like Nina Simone, Betty Davis, and Darnella Frazier, who filmed the murder of George Floyd.

Generations of Black women have borne children, borne the burdens of events untold, and borne witness to unspeakable trials. The Waterbearers carries this history, its fierce eloquence capturing a masterpiece of life written by an author who is intimately acquainted with how Black women have passed down knowledge and culture. Sasha Bonét doesn’t just present genealogical lineages but illuminates the cultural and societal connections of strong Black women who have built legacies and changed the world, sometimes in the most mundane of moments. The fierce eloquence of this story confirms Sasha Bonét as a voice we all now need to hear.