"From a stunning new voice, comes a powerful debut novel, Perish, about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intergenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed. Bear it or perish. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateful night in her cousin's outhouse that change the trajectory of her life. Spanning decades, Perish tracks the choices Helen Jean--the matriarch...

"Set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival."-- From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty...

Who wants to believe their family could ever be broken? Devon and James Payne are brothers and rivals since childhood. But they share an affinity for sports that brings glory to their Connecticut town and promise for the future. Then they're in a car accident. Devon is paralyzed for life, while James goes on to live the dream. For the Paynes, the tremulous repercussions of that evening never settled. Over the course of a decade, Devon decides to visit...

"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...

"Cedric The Entertainer's debut novel Flipping Boxcars is a valentine to close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. The story is also an homage to Cedric's grandfather, who in this tale emerges as Babe. He is a charismatic and widely loved man. He is also a gambler, whose gift of gab often gets him out of tricky situations, which is often. Babe is also a dreamer, something he shares in common with...

"A father's sudden disappearance exposes the private fears, dreams, longings, and joys of a Black American family in the late decades of the twentieth century, in this page-turning and intimate new novel from the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls. It's a warm, bright October afternoon, and Ozro Armstead walks out into the brilliant sunshine on his thirty-seventh birthday. At home, his wife Deborah and daughter Trinity prepare...

"Even though she has six siblings, sixteen-year-old Novah still knows what it's like to feel lonely. Her friends never invite her anywhere because they assume Novah will be too busy overseeing dinner, bath time, and homework--tasks that fall to her when her parents are at work. She wouldn't mind it so much if her "perfect" older sister, Ariana, wasn't always excused from helping out. Needless to say, Novah feels like she's been given a raw deal, especially...

"When Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California, they hope to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos,including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to fit in. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists...

"Five years ago, Orlando Duncan created the drug HEAT. When he is awakened by an alarm in his lab, he discovers that robbers have take over a million tabs of HEAT. Billionaire Alexander Cora's company is a front for one of the largest smuggling rings in the world. Niles Monroe, the handsome hit man and Paris Duncan's one true love, is back from the dead and it's only a matter of time before he comes looking for her. These rich and powerful people...

Forced to spend the summer before senior year in Coldwater, Maryland, where her estranged and dying grandmother lives, Jericka makes a chilling discovery that causes her to question everything she thought she knew about her mother, her childhood, and thelines between the living and the dead.