Twenty-three year old Callie has lived in bondage at Oakheart Plantation since her birth. She has become a valuable asset to her cruel master, Daniel Bowen, but Callie, her two brothers, and her young daughter struggle to cope with the outrages of enslavement. Change occurs suddenly on November 7, 1861, when the Union Navy attacks Port Royal Sound in South Carolina. Slavery ends across the surrounding sea islands after the planters flee. Ten thousand newly freed people, like Callie and her...

The newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection: this special ebook edition of Ruby by Cynthia Bond features exclusive content, including Oprah’s personal notes, highlighted within the text; a reading group guide; and audio clips read by the author (supported devices only).The epic, unforgettable story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her, this beautiful and devastating debut heralds the arrival of a major new...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner: "Rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible Man" ( The Christian Science Monitor).Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington has left Philadelphia, where he is employed by a major university, to return to his hometown just north of the Mason–Dixon Line. He is there to care for Old Jack, one of the men who helped raise him when h...

The Story of an African Farm, written by Olive Schreiner, is a classic example of 19th-century Realism in literature. Through her use of detailed, realistic descriptions and finely crafted characters, Schreiner is able to illustrate the struggles between traditionalism and emerging modernity in rural South Africa during this period. The novel is renowned for its exploration of social and gender issues, as well as its critiques of colonialism and imperialism.

A family of Eastern European refugees finds a home in racially charged St. Louis in this sweeping historical novel from a National Jewish Book Award finalist.In 1916, Mags Preacher arrives in the big city of St. Louis, fresh from the piney woods, hoping to learn the beauty trade. Instead, she winds up with a job at Fishbein's Funeral Home, run by an émigré who came to America to flee the pogroms of Russia. Mags knows nothing about Jews except that they killed the Lo...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, and Deacon King KongJames McBride’s powerful memoir, The Color of Water, was a groundbreaking literary phenomenon that transcended racial and religious boundaries, garnering unprecedented acclaim and topping bestseller lists for more than two years. Now McBride turns his extraordinary gift for storytelling to fict...

Did she go too far?Dallas Marshall is beautiful, rich and...relentless. Once she decides she wants to be with Avery nothing will stand in her way. But becoming a powerful vampire who cannot control her hunger threatens to push Avery further out of her reach. And that is not all. Dallas now finds herself up against an ancient evil that seeks to be reborn through her.Can he let go of his lost beloved?Avery's heart has grieved for Luna, his lost love, for decades. When...

Short-listed for the Orange Award for New Writers & long-listed for the Orange PrizeIt is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black ranchers even rarer.But it hasn’t rained in months, the cattle bellow with thirst, and supplies ar...

Can he love her without drawing her into the dangerous web of his secret past?A Woman Who Knows Her Own MindPrudence Emerson doesn't have time for romantic entanglements. She's taken a job at the mercantile, and is saving money to attend school at Oberlin. That is, until the Reverend Derrick Chase rides into town to start a new church. Her good friend Lilly Warren invites her to a service at Enduring Faith Moravian church, and the die is ca...

There isn't much that Addy Grayson hasn't faced—the wrath of General Sherman in the Civil War, the murder of her lover, the life of a widowed Southern woman. She'd stood strong against fear and tradition in order to raise her daughter alone. Somehow she managed to keep her land, her family, and her secrets. Now she is an old woman raising her granddaughters in a world full of new challenges, unsure if she has the energy to endure.And what of her granddaughter Anna's challenges, and...

**From the author of bestselling Invisible Man—the classic novel of African-American experience—this long-awaited second novel tells an evocative tale of a prodigal of the twentieth century. Brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise, Juneteenth is the work of an American master."Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Senator Adam Sunraider to the itinerate preacher whom he calls Daddy Hickman. As a young man, Sunraider was Bliss, a...

The powerful and prophetic story of a talented young African American and his struggles to overcome deep-rooted racism and intolerance in post–World War II AmericaAmbitious and well-educated, US Army officer Steve Hill leaves California for the East Coast and his slice of the American Dream when he takes a job as publicity director at a vanity press. But mid-twentieth-century New York City harbors its own particular brand of prejudice, more secretive but just as per...