American Literature

Ria Parkar is Bollywood's favorite ice princess - beautiful, poised, and scandal-proof - until one impulsive act threatens to expose her destructive past. Traveling home to Chicago for her cousin's wedding offers a chance to defuse the coming media storm and find solace in family, food, and outsized celebrations that are like one of her vibrant movies come to life. But it also means confronting Vikram Jathar.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

The Earth barely survived the Third World War. It isn’t ready for the War of the Worlds. A beam of pure Chaos has descended on the Earth connecting it to the Labyrinth Universe. Monsters will spawn, heroes will level and nations will fall. Chaos will Awaken!

They say that good girls like bad boys, and this was especially true for Pearl Stone, a child born of privilege to a drug baron and reputed killer known in the streets as Big Stone. Although the flashy, fast-paced nature of the streets calls to Pearl, she's been brought up to look but not touch. Yet when a young hustler named Diamonds crawls up from the swamps of Louisiana and sets up shop in New York City, everything Pearl was taught flies out the window.

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC, this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.

Playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange originally composed for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf in as a mesmerizingly original choreopoem. The New York Post called it "rich with the author's special voice: by turns bitter, funny, ironic, and savage; fiercely honest and personal." Now a new audiobook, it chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of women facing shatteringly difficult issues, and evokes the indomitable power of enduring hope and joy.

In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox - possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami.

On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife.

When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her meddlesome mother calls for her even more meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate, especially when it is inadvertently shipped in a cake cooler to the over-the-top billionaire wedding Meddy, her Ma, and aunties are working at an island resort on the California coastline.

While Jaylin fights his battle to stay out of jail for giving Felicia a major beat-down, he also has to do what it takes to maintain his marriage to Nokea. This time, she’s skeptical about standing by her man, and when she finds out that Scorpio and Jaylin can’t quite keep their feelings under control, throwing in the towel just might be the best thing to do. Till death do us part, Jaylin confirms, as losing his wife is not an option. For everyone, Scorpio’s cravings for the one man she’ll never be able to conquer must come to an end.

In the dawn of history, a valiant people forged a pathway from an old world into a new one. Led by a dreamer who followed the spirit of the wolf, a handful of courageous men and women dared to cross the frozen wastes to find an untouched, unspoiled continent.

Carl Weber is the New York Times best-selling author of Baby Momma Drama and Player Haters. To be a member of the Big Girls Book Club, there's just one requirement: be a size 14 - at least.

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

He's rich, successful - and has been faithfully married to his longtime girlfriend for nearly one grueling year. Because for Dr. Dorian Graham, too many women is never too much - no matter how loyal his wife, Shantae, has been since their college days. So when she proposes they celebrate their first anniversary by each spending a no-questions-asked, no-consequences night with their greatest temptation, Dorian is shocked, but can't resist. Especially since Shantae's wild-card younger sister, Reagan, is gorgeous, uninhibited - and the one who got away.

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she’s never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning in the woods, she hears a scream. When she returns to search the area, all she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring.

From the best-selling author of Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade - and who must pass as a girl to survive. Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856 - a battleground between anti - and pro-slavery forces - when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry's master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town.

Japanese-American Rei Shimura is a 27-year-old English teacher living in one of Tokyo's seediest neighborhoods. She doesn't make much money, but she wouldn't go back home to California even if she had a free ticket (which, thanks to her parents, she does). Her independence is threatened, when a getaway to an ancient castle town is marred by murder. Rei is the first to find the beautiful wife of a high-powered businessman, dead in the snow. Taking charge, as usual, Rei looks for clues by crashing a funeral, posing as a bar-girl, and somehow ends up pursued by police and paparazzi alike.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes.