Adenrele Ojo
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"In this part-manifesto, part-memoir, the revolutionary editor who infused social consciousness into the pages of Teen Vogue explores what it means to come into your own -- on your own terms Throughout her life, Elaine Welteroth has climbed the ranks of media and fashion, shattering ceilings along the way. In this riveting and timely memoir, the groundbreaking journalist unpacks lessons on race, identity, and success through her own journey, from...
23) Full disclosure
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Simone, seventeen, HIV-positive and in love for the first time, decides that facing potential bullies head-on may be better than protecting her secret.
Simone Garcia-Hampton is starting over at a new school, making real friends, making a name for herself as student director of Rent, and making a play for Miles. The last thing she wants is for word to get out that she's HIV-positive, because last time things got ugly. As Simone and Miles start going...
24) Memphis: a novel
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"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
25) The Turner house
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"A powerful, timely debut, The Turner House marks a major new contribution to the story of the American family. The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. Their house has seen thirteen children grown and gone--and some returned; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit's East Side, and the loss of a father. The house still stands despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to...
26) Heart of iron
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Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09 one of the last remaining illegal Metals has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.
27) Corregidora
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Here is Gayl Jones's classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.
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When Lena Johnson's beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan. On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program - and lie to her friends and family about the...
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"Like her mother, Rue is an all-knowing midwife, healer, and conjurer of curses on the plantation of Marse Charles. Moving back and forth in time between the years before and after the Civil War, this novel tells the story of Rue, the families she cares for, and the mysteries and secrets she knows about the plantation owner's daughter, Varina. At the heart of this story is the intimate bonds and transgressions among people and across racial divides,...
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Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. "Wonderfully written...populated by vivid characters and rendered in fascinating detail." —Nancy Kline, New York Times Book Review
Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and
...34) Promise
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A devastating tornado rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression. Dovey, a black laundress, searches for her family. At the McNabb house she find the daughter of the house, Jo, who suffered a head wound. When a baby is found in the wreckage is it Jo's baby brother, Tommy, or Dovey's light-skinned great-grandson, Promise? The two women-- one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager-- are...
35) The birdcatcher
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"Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island"--
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"Good things never happen in November--at least not for the Reynolds women. It was the month they lost their patriarch. And the month when fourteen-year-old Trinity went missing during a tropical storm. So Hope Reynolds isn't surprised when it becomes the month she walks in on her boyfriend kissing another woman. Or when she receives a panicked call from her mother about a mistake that could cost the family their treasured beach house. Meanwhile,...
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"Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and...
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Mississippi plantation mistress Amanda Satterfield loses her daughter to cholera after her husband refuses to treat her for what he considers to be a "slave disease." Insane with grief, Amanda takes a newborn slave child as her own and names her Granada, much to the outrage of her husband and the amusement of their white neighbors. Seventy-five years later, Granada, now known as Gran Gran, is still living on the plantation and must revive the buried...
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"Calling to mind the best works of Paul Beatty and Junot Diaz, this collection of moving, timely, and darkly funny stories examines the concept of black identity in this so-called post-racial era. A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes. Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original...
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"The Record Keeper is empathy through fiction."
- Actor, Comedian and Film Producer Wayne Brady on The Record Keeper which he plans to bring to the Silver Screen.
The Record Keeper is a visceral and thrilling near-future dystopia examining past and present race relations.
After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law—in...
- Actor, Comedian and Film Producer Wayne Brady on The Record Keeper which he plans to bring to the Silver Screen.
The Record Keeper is a visceral and thrilling near-future dystopia examining past and present race relations.
After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law—in...