African American Literature Fiction

Against all odds, Adirah Messa has been accepted to Billet University, a prestigious institution founded in the 1800s for people of color. Determined to excel, she arrives at the university intent on minimizing distraction and focusing on her studies. That goal is soon interrupted when she is noticed by members of the "in" crowd, who invite her to the most popular frat party on campus. Adirah finds herself smitten with someone of another race and is taken on a ride she can never return from. Unbeknownst to her, Adirah's newfound love is not only a master seducer.

Picking up where Essence best-selling author La Jill Hunt's Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda left off, Too Close for Comfort follows Paige Michaels and her no-nonsense friends as they search for love. Paige has finally broken loose from her no-good man, and she's loving the single life - until Quincy Westbrooke shows up.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’ first Black president. Great Expectations is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign.

In this suspenseful Southern tale, we are introduced to King, a Southern born and bred hustler who is determined to take the drug empire handed to him by his father into the legitimate world of the music industry. Little does he know that when the streets birth you, trying to leave can be deadly. King's life is looking good when he meets a beautiful, classy queen.

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, 17-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is 21, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth.

In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family. Nearly 100 years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays her grandchild to be her companion.

Pregnant by a man she learned wasn't who she thought he was and starting a new career, she's forced to step up and show everyone around her she's more than the hothead, feisty, girl they believe her to be.

Lieutenant Stuart Lyons is a single father and a well-respected veteran law enforcement officer. In addition, he serves as head of security at the ever-popular New Hope Church in Atlanta and above all, he loves the Lord. When sudden pandemonium strikes his “normal” life and he begins receiving threats from an unknown person who only identifies himself as “Dr. A. H. Satan”, Stuart’s life is turned upside down.

Nelah seems to have it all: fame, wealth, and a long-awaited daughter growing in a government lab. But, trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman who uses a microchip to monitor her every move, Nelah’s perfect life is precarious. After a drug-fueled evening culminates in an eerie car accident, Nelah commits a desperate crime and buries the body, daring to hope that she can keep one last secret.

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. And it is also Cassie's story - Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect.

Set in 1950s New Orleans, Little Black Girl Lost is a powerful tale filled with sex, greed, and the explosive political and social climates of an America long gone. Fifteen-year-old beauty Johnnie Wise lives her life devoted to God. But her innocence is shattered when her mother, who has been a prostitute for years, sells Johnnie's body to lecherous insurance man Earl Shamus.

Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed "The Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life’s storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband’s humiliating infidelities. Beautiful, fragile Barbara Jean is rocked by the tragic reverberations of a youthful love affair. And fearless Odette engages in the most terrifying battle of her life....

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters.

Marisol Rivera barely survived being abused with nowhere to turn. So there's nothing she won't do to keep her Lower East Side women's health clinic open and give disadvantaged women new lives. Running an exclusive escort service for New York City's rich and powerful 1 percent is the perfect way to bankroll her business - not to mention the perfect cover for robbing corrupt CEOs.

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in the late 1960s. With its focus on the “militancy” that characterized the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this is the story of one man’s reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy.

The Misfits are back and now they are international. Trigga, Diamond, and the crew are in London. Dame has been handled and everything should be perfect. But when a plan works too perfectly, there is bound to be some unfinished business. Secrets are exposed. Diamond has learned the game and now she must continue to embrace a life she was not meant to live while understanding the truths of her own past.

After World War III, Earth is in ruins, and the final armies have come to a reluctant truce. Everyone must obey the law - in every way - or risk shattering the fragile peace and endangering the entire human race. Although Arika Cobane is a member of the race whose backbreaking labor provides food for the remnants of humanity, she is destined to become a member of the Kongo elite. After 10 grueling years of training, she is on the threshold of taking her place of privilege far from the fields. But everything changes when a new student arrives.

"No Strings Attached": When they were children, people couldn't tell identical twins Brooke and Brittany apart. Now that they're grown, the beautiful, plus-sized divas still look alike, but they are very different. Brooke is a free spirit who lives life on her own terms and does things her way. Brittany, on the other hand, is cautious and plays by the rules. Despite their differences, the sisters are each other's yin and yang - until a frivolous one-night stand with a stranger turns their lives inside out and jeopardizes their sisterhood forever.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”