African Saga

When young Armstrong Todd's mother sends him to spend the summer in her native rural Mississippi, the Chicago-bred 15-year-old is unused to the segregated ways of the Deep South. So when the black youth utters a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, he has no idea of the impending firestorm he has ignited. Armstrong ends up paying the ultimate price when the offended woman's husband and his friends decide to teach the youth a lesson.

In the years following the Civil War, Mariah Reddick, former slave to Carrie McGavock - the "Widow of the South" - has quietly built a new life for herself as a midwife to the women of Franklin, Tennessee. But when her ambitious, politically minded grown son, Theopolis, is murdered, Mariah - no stranger to loss - finds her world once more breaking apart. How could this happen? Who wanted him dead?

On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife, Angeline, are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear jazz and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the swirling, heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts jazz dynamite from his horn.

The heralded Queen of Hip-Hop Lit presents an addictive collection of celebrated urban authors with their fingers on the pulse of the streets. Street lit’s finest female voices—Keisha Starr, Tysha, LaKesa Cox, and Monique S. Hall—deliver searing stories about women who make hard sacrifices to stay on top of their hustle and seize the power, money, and fame they can’t live without.

For Dana, what should be the happiest day of her life becomes the day her world falls apart. Her daughter is born beautiful and healthy, but no one can help noticing the African-American traits in her appearance. Dana's husband, to her great shock and dismay, begins to worry that people will think she has had an affair. Now Dana has to track down the father she never knew and explore the possibility of African-American lineage in his family history.

Blackboard and Essence best-selling author Francis Ray has been honored with the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, as well as the EMMA and Golden Pen Awards. Here, she continues the saga of the Grayson family with Morgan's story. Mother Ruth Grayson is pushing her son to get married, but he resists - until he meets Phoenix, a beautiful artist with a secret.

A poem about how a wolf tricked a shepherd and taught him a valuable life lesson.

In the early 60s, Tayo Ajayi sails to England from Nigeria to take up a scholarship at Oxford University. There he discovers a whole generation high on visions of a new and better world. He meets Vanessa Richardson, the beautiful daughter of a former colonial officer. Their story, which spans four decades, is a bittersweet tale of a brave but doomed affair and the universal desire to fall truly, madly, and deeply in love.

The Texas rancher and Navy SEAL who fathered Bristol Lockett's son died a hero's death...or so she was told. Yet when Laramie "Coop" Cooper strolls into her exhibit at an art gallery three years later, he's very much alive - and still making her pulse zing. The all-consuming chemistry between them is as undeniable now as it was then, but Bristol won't risk her heart - or their son's. Little does Bristol know he's determined to win over his unexpected family at any cost!

Catch my gaze means your eyes better always find mine.

In the wilderness of discovering who you are and how you fit into the world, the most important lesson you'll learn is whether you're part of the pack or one of the prey.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina, by a Black nurse who declares, “Lord Jesus, if that ain’t the blackest little baby born this side of heaven.” Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors’ promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi’s red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior, his son and Lottie Rebecca’s father, born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the post Korean War GI Bill promises prosperity.

As the 1950s' Mau Mau war breaks out in the foothills of Mt. Kenya, Wambũi, a 14-year-old girl, leaves her besieged village to join a prestigious boarding school, a half day’s journey away by train. There, she becomes aware of her extraordinary mathematical abilities discovered by her teacher Eileen Atwood. Initially, Wambũi views Eileen’s attentions with suspicion and hostility, but over time, the two grow close and form a lifelong friendship.

Amaryllis Price, once a relationship destroyer and professional husband stealer, has turned her life around. She's made a vow to live right and walk the straight and narrow, but Amaryllis finds herself at a crossroads when her past catches up with her. She could never resist Charles Walker, and when he reappears in her life, he's even sexier than she remembered. Will she remain celibate and resist the wiles of the devil?

Timbuktu, western Africa, 1706. Folashade, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a professor of linguistics, is sent south with her older sisters, Bibi and Adaeze, to endure the painful ceremony that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is expected to. In Djenné, on the banks of the Niger, the sisters’ fate and that of their fellow Bambara are changed forever when they’re kidnapped, marched toward grueling indignities on Gorée Island, and eventually hauled aboard an English slaver bound for the Americas.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.