South African Fiction

Shatika “Empress” Tibideaux was living a Bawss’ life. Trained by her big brother, Birmingham, AL’s notorious Deondre “Show” Burns, she and her husband, Jayontae “Tae” Tibideaux, had built and empire that would set their great-great-grandkids straight. But her world starts to fall apart when the Feds kick in her door and she takes the charge for her man, like a true ridah would. She soon finds that loyalty doesn’t go both ways, when Tae leaves her to do her bid on her own. When Empress finally tastes freedom again, she discovers that Tae’s betrayal goes way deeper than ...

Born in what’s now called Zimbabwe, journalist Peter Godwin returns to his homeland in 2008 after three decades of Robert Mugabe’s brutal economic and human destruction. Hoping to “dance on Mugabe’s political grave” in the wake of the tyrant’s defeat at the polls, Godwin instead risks his life to secretly chronicle Mugabe’s ruthless backlash of torture and terror locals call “The Fear.”

Carl Weber brings the best of urban street lit authors together, all telling their own dramatic tales of life in the streets in known cities across the USA. The second installment continues with Treasure Hernandez telling the tale of the Dirty South.

Imani Jones believed a man was meant to be nurtured into his true self. She often made the common mistake many women made of taking some dirt, adding blood, sweat and tears to turn it to clay, molding it, fashioning it, polishing it up and putting it in the window for display. Then, they went out and found a more refined piece of pottery to match the beauty she had bestowed in them. It was a Catch-22 and she had come to the conclusion that she was meant to be alone… A woman of affairs. Affairs that left a new scent lingering on her skin each night. Until Vincent Garvey entered the picture...

The summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, is unseasonably hot, and Opal Pruitt senses a nameless storm brewing. She hopes this foreboding feeling won’t overshadow her upcoming 18th birthday or the annual Founder’s Day celebration in just a few weeks. She and her Grandma Birdie work as housekeepers for the white widow Miss Peggy, and Opal desperately wants some time to be young and carefree with her cousins and friends.

In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.

***Standalone*** ***Re-release*** When dealin’ with men with illegal dealings, it takes a true ridah to hold their savage down. After all the drama, making Birmingham hot, Elijah “Eli” Barns was more than ready to get the hell out of dodge. Right on time, his cousin Trouble called from Dallas, and said they were looking for someone with his specialty, artillery. Without a second thought, Eli packed up his fiancé Anita and her daughter, and was on the first thing smoking to Texas. Anita Bridges was a Bham chick through and through. She wasn’t feelin’ the move to Dallas, but there ...

In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

So begins award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron’s debut novel, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Tabor spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their stories and witnessing their struggles. On Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, where her grandparents live, Mika learns important lessons from the people who raise her.

Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn’t align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late ’80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts—the AIDS crisis and Rodney King’s attack—collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy.

Is anything truly beyond redemption, beyond the hope of repair, restoration, or renewal? Absolutely not! Jacqueline Vance might beg to differ, as her life spirals out of control. In her thirties, navigating the complexities of marriage and the ache of childlessness, she finds herself at the heart of a murder mystery in Southern Hills. Amidst the darkest betrayal, she discovers that no one, not even her occasional ally Yolanda, is beyond God's reach for redemption. Through this ordeal, Jacqueline learns to confront her current struggles with resilience, eyeing the possibility of what lies ...

Tina Jenson belongs to the same social stratum as Harris Chapman, but he’s out of her league - at least that’s what she thinks before they jump in bed together. It’s the perfect night, but when she overhears crude, hurtful comments the next morning, she can’t get away fast enough. Ten years later, Tina’s life is a mess. That night with Harris didn’t just hurt her feelings; it started a cascade of disappointment and heartbreak. Every time she bumps into Harris, her heart twists inside out. And she’s harboring a painful secret from their night together.

You can’t spell challenge without change. Joseph “J-Rock” Henry is torn between his life’s focus, the most important trial of his career, and the woman who has proven to be his soulmate. But loyalty goes a long way with him, and he feels like she has shown, beyond the shadow of a doubt, where her loyalty is. Still, he can’t shake the feelings he has for her; to the point where it costs him his focus. With too much going on to deal with feelings, and too much at stake, he has to leave Char to fend for herself and focus on those he knows are on the right side. Charlotte “Char” ...

After years of self-exile, Jacinda “Jac” Brodie is back in Brook Haven, South Carolina. But the small cliffside town no longer feels like home. Jac hasn’t been there since the beloved chief of police fell to his death—and all the whispers said she was to blame. That chief was Jac’s father. Racked with guilt, Jac left town with no plans to return. But when her granddad lands in the hospital, she rushes back to her family, bracing herself to confront the past.

When Ann Waite discovers a shipwreck in Algoa Bay she is stunned to find survivors: a scarred sailor and a little boy. As the man walks away into the distance alone, Ann is left to raise the young child, Harry, in place of the baby she tragically lost at sea. Disaster and hardship befall Ann and Harry, and desperation drives them into the path of the mysterious shipwrecked man once more. Ralph Courtney has recently escaped Robben Island with two fellow prisoners and is destined to seek his fortune at Nativity Bay, the fabled place about which his father told him stories.

Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—young people are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television.

From the author of The Power of One comes a new novel about Africa. The time is 1939. White South Africa is a deeply divided nation with many of the Afrikaner people fanatically opposed to the English. The world is also on the brink of war, and South Africa elects to fight for the Allied cause against Germany. Six-year-old Tom Fitzsaxby finds himself in The Boys Farm, an orphanage in a remote town in the high mountains, where the Afrikaners side fiercely with Hitler's Germany.

When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa’s hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen’s daughter and Clarissa’s sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa’s husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once-powerful family.

The Lovett family was just like any other working class family trying to live the American dream, but when tragedy strikes it sends them on a new adventure to try and rebuild their lives. They move from the Windy City of Chicago Illinois, to a small town down south. Right on the Bible Belt. There, they purchase their dream home and open up a family practice. Everyone is so friendly and the Lovett's fit right in. There's just one thing... nobody stays out after the sunset. The Lovett's chalk this up to small town superstition. That is, until one of the kid's friends comes up missing! As if ...

Five miles off the South Carolina coast, Darden and Catherina are getting their promised forty acres, all of it undersea. Like every Black “mer,” they’ve been experimentally modified to adapt to their new subaquatic home - and have met with extreme resistance from white supremacists. Darden has an inspired plan for resolution. For both those on land and the webbed bottom-dwellers below, Darden is hoping to change the wave of the future.