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African American Fiction & Non-Fiction March/April 2020
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In this Special Ebook Issue |
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Across the Way
by Mary Monroe
Tensions between the bootlegging Hamiltons and the respectable Watson families in Depression-era Alabama reach a boiling point that leads to lies, deceit and violence, in the finale of the Neighbors series.
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Africaville: a Novel
by Jeffrey Colvin
Three generations of a family of former slaves, the founders of a small Nova Scotia community, navigate prejudice, harsh weather and estrangements against a backdrop of the historical events of the 20th century.
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Blitzed
by Alexa Martin
Professional athlete Maxwell Lewis must convince no-nonsense bar owner Brynn Sterling that he is the perfect man for her, but fate conspires against him especially when ghosts from both their pasts make a sudden reappearance.
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Butterfly
by Ashley Antoinette
"Run away from the boy that give you butterflies, he's going to break your heart." Morgan Atkins had been told that phrase ever since she was a little girl and still she allowed herself to fall for the boy that made her heart flutter. After losing her first love, Morgan is terrified to love again. She's settled for a comfortable life with a respectable man. She has everything. She's living in the lap of luxury and although she's comfortable, she's bored out of her mind. When a ghost from her past blows into town, she finds herself entangled in an illicit affair. It's wrong, but she can't fight the butterflies he gives her and honestly, she doesn't want to. She can't hide the natural attraction she feels and soon, she's so deep involved that she can no longer tell where the boundary between right and wrong lies. Her heart is telling her one thing, but her head is saying another. Morgan Atkins has always been a spoiled girl and she tries to have it all, but when she's forced to choose between a good man and a bad boy, someone will end up hurt. Someone just may end up dead." ~Book Jacket
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The Business of Lovers: a Novel
by Eric Jerome Dickey
While a father struggles to reconnect with his estranged son and spiteful ex, his bodyguard brother is invited by three women escorts to consider a job as a male prostitute.
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Deacon King Kong: a Novel
by James McBride
In the aftermath of a 1969 Brooklyn church deacon’s public shooting of a local drug dealer, the community’s African-American and Latinx witnesses find unexpected support from each other when they are targeted by violent mobsters.
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Everywhere You Don't Belong
by Gabriel Bump
Raised by a civil-rights activist grandmother on the South Side of Chicago, Claude McKay Love searches for a sense of belonging before a riot compels his departure for college, where he discovers he cannot escape his past.
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The Holdout: a Novel
by Graham Moore
"It's the most sensational case of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar real estate fortune, vanishes on her way home from school. Her teacher Bobby Nock, a twenty-five-year-old African American man, is the prime suspect after illicit text messages are discovered between them--and Jessica's blood is found in his car. The subsequent trial taps straight into America's most pressing preoccupations: race, class, sex, law enforcement, and the lurid sins of the rich and famous. It's an open and shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed. Until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, convinced of Nock's innocence, persuades the rest of the jurors to return the verdict of not guilty, a controversial decision that will change all of their lives forever. Flash forward ten years. A true-crime docuseries reassembles the jurors, with particular focus on Maya, now a defense attorney herself. When one of the jurors is found dead in Maya's hotel room, all evidence points to her as the killer. Now, she must prove her own innocence--by getting to the bottom of a case that is far from closed. As the present-day murder investigation weaves together with the story of what really happened during their deliberation, told by each of the jurors in turn, the secrets they have all been keeping threaten to come out--with drastic consequences for all involved."
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It's Not All Downhill From Here: a Novel
by Terry McMillan
Confident that her best days are still ahead, a successful businesswoman relies on close friends and her resourcefulness when an unexpected loss turns her world upside down.
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Lakewood: a Novel
by Megan Giddings
Forced to drop out of school to help support her family, Lena takes a lucrative job as a secret laboratory subject before devastating side effects make her question how much she can sacrifice.
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Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
Keeping his head down at a lakeside Midwestern university where the culture is in sharp contrast to his Alabama upbringing, an introverted African-American biochem student endures unexpected encounters that bring his orientation and defenses into question.
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Remembrance
by Rita Woods
Looks at present-day Ohio, 1791 Haiti, and 1857 New Orleans, in which house girl Margot is sold just before her 18th birthday and her promised freedom, and, desperate, she escapes and tries to find Remembrance, a rumored stop on the Underground Railroad
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Riot Baby
by Tochi Onyebuchi
Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella - through visits both mundane and supernatural - tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down. ~Book Jacket
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Such a Fun Age: a Novel
by Kiley Reid
Seeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections.
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Trouble Is What I Do
by Walter Mosley
Detective Leonid McGill is forced to confront the ghost of his felonious past when a nonagenarian Mississippi bluesman is targeted by an infamous assassin.
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Black Radical: the Life and times of William Monroe Trotter
by Kerri Greenidge
"This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter's essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes. William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era."
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A Black Women's History of the United States
by Daina Ramey Berry
Two award-winning history professors and authors focus on the stories of African-American women slaves, civilians, religious leaders, artists, queer icons, activists and criminals in a celebration of black womanhood that demonstrates its indelible role in shaping America.
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She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman
by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Explores the complexities and achievements of iconic abolitionist Harriet Tubman, combining rare commentary with new and public-domain photographs to offering modern insights into Tubman’s role in the Civil War, suffrage and emancipation. 75,000 first printing. Illustrations.
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