African American Families

Anissa Dent is experiencing heartbreak like none she’s ever felt. Her husband of nearly twenty years has fallen victim to crack cocaine after a devastating loss. All her efforts to help him have failed, and to protect herself and her sons, she divorces him and has him removed from their home. That doesn’t stop him from popping in and out of their lives with promises of getting clean. Anissa desperately wants to move on in her life, but her love for what once was is holding her back. However, attending a family barbeque with her son proves to be the restart she desperately needs.

Momma drama takes over the Duncan clan, as there is still uncertainty about who has fathered the Duncan sisters' new babies. Meanwhile, Orlando Duncan, the family's new CEO and a man with his own baby momma problems, has just developed a new product that may make the millionaire Duncans into billionaires. Orlando only has one obstacle in front of him, and it's not law enforcement or one of his family's many rivals. It's his mother, because she's making the family take sides. Can a civil war within the Duncan family be averted before it tears them apart?

Light-skinned Selina Standish lives a life of emotional pain and torment. In 1906, at the age of eight, she is convinced by her mother, actress Lavinia Standish, the daughter of a slave, to pass as white. Although Selina yields to her mother's insistence to pass, she refuses to cut ties completely with her Negro relatives, including her twin brother, a child her mother deems too dark. However, at age 17, in the year 1915, Selina meets wealthy Southerner Jack Cosgrove, the man of her dreams. Keeping her ancestry a secret, Selina is conflicted by Jack's negative attitude toward her race.

Loving hard doesn’t do anyone any good when the love isn’t reciprocated. If Rondo Simpson could have a do-over in his love life, he would jump at the opportunity. The woman he’s loved for over ten years has committed the ultimate betrayal and has convinced him that love just isn’t in the cards for him. Even attempts at love before her seemed to be one-sided and left him heartbroken. However, unexpectedly, the type of woman he’s been longing for walks into his life when everything is in disarray, stealing his attention from the word go.

Savannah has awakened to the fact that she's made too many concessions in her marriage. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle. Robin has an all-American case of shopaholism. Gloria has taken happiness and security for granted. But being at the wrong place at the wrong time can change everything. All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another.

Ripped from the pages of Carl Weber's New York Times best-selling Family Business series comes a solo story about his most popular character to date - the bright, sexy, and deadly Paris Duncan. Join Carl Weber and Eric Pete as they go back in time and take Paris Duncan to Europe, to the finishing school where she meets her first true love, makes her first real enemy, and commits her first crime. Listeners will get a thrilling inside view into the events that made Paris the lovely but lethal woman she is today.

One of five children, Pat watched as her alcoholic mother struggled to get by on charity, cons, and petty crimes. At age seven, Pat was taught to roll drunks for money. At 12, she was targeted for sex by a man eight years her senior; by 13, she was pregnant. By 15, Pat was a mother of two. Alone at 16, Pat was determined to make a better life for her children. But with no job skills and an eighth-grade education, her options were limited. She learned quickly that hustling and humor were the only tools she had to survive.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her 12 Black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

Betty Jean already has her hands full when her grown daughter leaves her two young sons in her care. In between dealing with her other adult children, two opinionated sisters, an ill husband, and her own postponed dreams - BJ still manages to hold down a job delivering room service at a hotel. Her son Dexter is about to be paroled from prison; Quentin, the family success, can’t be bothered to lend a hand; and taking care of two lively grandsons is the last thing BJ thinks she needs. But who asked her?

Secrets are revealed in more ways than one. The truth always has a way of revealing itself. What happens when everyone is hiding something from the other? When relationships and bonds are tested in more ways than one. Will these relationships end before they could fully start?

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers. In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives.

Through the darkest tunnel comes the light, but for Caesar King, there is nothing but more darkness on the other side. After the failed attempt on his life, he is afraid that the Pact of the Five Families is no more. He can trust nobody. Whoever murdered Barry is now aiming for Caesar's crown, and the only way to flush them out and figure out who's responsible is to go to war...with everybody.

- Second Edition I’ve been David’s wife for six years and in a heartbeat, I become the other woman. It’s a normal day for me, seeing off my husband and children to work and school. If I had known that it would be the last time I’d be David’s wife, I’d have done things differently. Thirty minutes after my perfect family walk out of the door, I get the call that every parent dreads. My husband and two children have been in a car accident. An hour after my beloved family walk out of the door, I get the news that no wife wants to hear. There was another woman in the car. Twelve ...

In the early 1990s, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother, Terry "Southwest T", rose up from the slums of Detroit to build one of the largest cocaine empires in American history: the Black Mafia Family. They socialized with music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, did business with New York's king of bling Jacob "The Jeweler" Arabo, and built allegiances with rap superstars Young Jeezy and Fabolous. Yet even as BMF was attracting celebrity attention, its crew members struck fear in a city.

Vegas Duncan's release from prison is right on time for his older brother Junior's engagement to the voluptuous Sonya Brown. Unfortunately Junior's attempt at happiness comes to a screeching halt when Sonya's husband, the mysterious Brother X, and his army of Muslim hit men declare war on the Duncan clan. Duncan family patriarch LC Duncan has gone up against many foes in his time.

In this fascinating tale set in 1919, the Thomas family leaves New Orleans for Chicago as part of the Great Migration, seeking equality denied in the South. They are confident and optimistic. But hope is extinguished when they are met by 6,000 National Guard troops deployed to quell an earlier race riot. Linda and Ben prepare their nephew Trey to lead the family through the treacherous landscape of a big city plagued by segregation, police violence, and corruption. Is he ready? They devise a risky plan to challenge real estate covenants banning Blacks from buying homes in white ...

Armand Blackstone wants very little in life, and needs even less--he's a millionaire in his own right, and scion of the Blackstone Empire. He has everything at his fingertips, everything a man could want--except Jo Dawson. His borderline obsession has lasted for over a decade, and he manages it the same way he controls everything else around him: with icy perfection. Simultaneously distancing himself and yet staying constantly aware of her, he's managed to keep his dignity intact and stay away from the one woman that drives him past the point of control. But now she's at risk, his younger ...

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, Silver Sparrow revolves around James Witherspoon's two families - the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters - the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle - she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another's lives.

Carlton “Big-Carl” Watts made his name in the streets by robbing and terrorizing drug dealers in order to provide for his family. That is, until he was murdered by a close friend. Leaving his wife to raise their two sons, ‘Champ and Mook’, alone in a poverty-stricken environment where only the strong survive. After their father's untimely demise, brothers, Champ and Mook, find themselves knee-deep in street life at very young ages. Burdened with the pressures of providing for their family as well as living up to the ruthless legacy their father left behind, they decide to dive head-...