African American Literature Fiction

Jonas, the only boy in a family of four children, has always been a fighter. From the neighborhood bullies to the stepfather who uses him and his siblings as punching bags, his life has always been one battle after another. When he crosses paths with rogue homicide detective Louis "Lou" Ceavers, he's offered a bargain that will change the course of his life. Detective Ceavers becomes like a guardian angel and surrogate father to Jonas, teaching him the game and guiding him in his quest for power.

Two years after being released from Camp Green Lake, Armpit is home in Austin, Texas, trying to turn his life around. But it's hard when you have a record, and everyone expects the worst from you. The only person who believes in him is Ginny, his 10-year-old disabled neighbor. Together, they are learning to take small steps. And he seems to be on the right path, until X-Ray, a buddy from Camp Green Lake, comes up with a get-rich-quick scheme.

Best-selling author Samona de la Cruz has found herself on the wrong side of love. Even though she knows that loving Elliot Louis-Jacques is wrong, she has no desire to be right. There's just one problem - Elliot is in a long-term relationship with Demitri Alexander. As an openly bisexual man, Elliot has no problem with having his cake and eating it, too. When he tells Mona and Demitri that he wants both of them at the same time, all hell breaks loose. But then Elliot's ex steps into the picture and throws a monkey wrench that Mona never saw coming.

Named for her beauty, Belle Dubois is as sweet as can be. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she is always given the best - until her world is turned upside down. When she's away in her second year of college, she receives a call informing her that her parents have been murdered. She soon finds out that they were broke, and subsequently, so is she. With no home and nowhere to go, Belle is whisked under the wing of a woman named Aria, better known by her stage name, Passion. Before she knows it, Belle becomes a part of an underground world that she knows nothing about.

One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he’s now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn’t even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.

Cam is a young man with a bright future in the music business who seemed to be on his way to the top after signing one of the hottest R&B singers in the world -a singer who goes by the name Honey. Cam and Honey hit it off hot and heavy as they mix business with pleasure. The sky is the limit for the young powerhouse couple. The only problem is Cam's fiancée, Yolanda. She and Cam have been together for seven long years, and she hates the fact that her man has to work with Honey.

Esi Edugyan won wide acclaim for her stunning novel Half-Blood Blues - a Man Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In it, 83-year-old Sid Griffiths remembers his time during WWII playing in a Berlin jazz band called the Hot Time Swingers. When jazz music was denounced by the Nazis, Sid and his bandmates fled to Paris - a move that put Hieronymous, the band's brilliantly talented trumpeter, in constant danger due to his Afro-German heritage.

After a hurricane of events, so many lies and secrets are left undisclosed between the Borrego brothers and their leading ladies. As Micah fights to regain Risa's trust, she battles against her past with Zo, as well as, for her future as a lawyer. Shortly after Dre discovers Romi's baby is his, he takes another life changing blow that could ruin him and Romi indefinitely.

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb.

Dominique Dom Pickens is an NFL player looking for a home in Atlanta. Wren comes highly recommended when it comes to realtors in the area. One look at Wren, and Dom is already picking out wedding venues. But what seems like the perfect match doesn't come easy. Wren has been hurt in the past, and she knows how professional athletes are, so she's not willing to put her heart on the line again.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

In 2003, Jay-Z retired from making music. He had made award-winning albums, founded a record label, and had his own line of clothing. He walked away, but he couldn't stop writing songs. Three years later, he was back on the charts with a hit album and the title of greatest MC of all time. Track this hip hop hero as he makes it in the music world and becomes one of the best known rappers in the world.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

Josephine "Jojo" Best has it all figured out. Just 17, she's been to college, she has her own hairdressing shop, and nothing will distract her from her goals. That is, until handsome George Brooks begins to pursue her. Then the return of her childhood nemesis complicates her life even further. No girl is immune to Adam Morgan's charm. But when a wound brings him home from the War Between the States, it's a girl he used to call "Pest" who's turning the tables. All grown up, Jojo is being courted by another soldier, and Adam knows it would be foolish to play with her heart.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.

Thirty years ago, Amelia Vaux Tanner and her husband built a house high on the bluffs, a cottage they named Chateau Laveau. For decades, “Ama” played host to American presidents, Wall Street titans, and cultural icons. But her favorite guests have always been her three “goddaughters”: Esperanza “Perry” Soto, a beautiful, talented Afro-Latina lawyer with Ama’s strong, yet guarded personality; Olivia Jones, a gifted Wall Street analyst with Ama’s brilliant, logical mind; and Billie Hayden, a gifted marine biologist and rule-breaker with Ama’s courageous free spirit.

As a painter travels the world and creates his art, he also mourns the death of his queen, his wife. He is secluded from the world and finds an escape through the drawings in his work. Not until he gets an unexpected knock at his door does his life take a drastic turn. The guest presents a problem that traps them inside of a home for 72 hours and this quiet suburban estate becomes the devil’s playground. The painter is then thrown into a psychological game that has twists and turns, which leads to an unforeseeable ending.

Yetu holds the memories for her people - water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners - who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one - the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities.

According to Max Disher, an ambitious young black man in 1930s New York, someone of his race has only three alternatives: "Get out, get white, or get along." Incapable of getting out and unhappy with getting along, Max leaps at the remaining possibility. Thanks to a certain Dr. Junius Crookman and his mysterious process, Max and other eager clients develop bleached skin that permits them to enter previously forbidden territory. What they discover in white society, however, gives them second thoughts.