Eleven-year-old Ella seeks information about her father while enjoying a visit with her mother, a jazz singer, in Boston in 1944, then returns to the harsh realities of segregated, small-town South Carolina.

When stylish young bibliophile Julia Kydd returns to 1920s New York, she's determined to launch her own private press. Julia's aspirations take her into the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement unlike any she's known--where notions of race, sexuality, and power are slippery, and identities can be deceptively fluid. At a risqǔ soiree, Julia befriends singer Eva Pruitt, whose new book is rumored to reveal lurid details about the Harlem...

Flashing back intermittently to dream-like scenes from his hardscrabble rural childhood, "Ray" chronicles Ray Charles' remarkable rise from sideman and Chitlin Circuit fixture to innovator, icon, and international superstar. Yet even as Charles ascends to the heights of the musical and cultural elite, he remains hobbled by heroin addiction and compulsive womanizing, a prisoner to his own insatiable needs. Through it all, Ray Charles possessed a rock-solid...

A sweeping, delirious romance begins in the Polish countryside, where Wiktor, a musician on a state-sponsored mission to collect folk songs, discovers a captivating young singer named Zula. Over the next fifteen years, their turbulent relationship will play out in stolen moments between two worlds: the jazz clubs of decadent, bohemian Paris, to which he defects, and the corrupt, repressive Communist Bloc, where she remains, universes bridged by their...