Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington returns to his hometown of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania—just north of the Mason-Dixon Line—to learn more about the death of his father. Washington discovers that his father was researching a mystery of his own: why 13 escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all.

In 1958 Georgia, the shade of a 13-year-old black girl's skin can make the difference in her fate. Tangy Mae is the smartest of her mother's 10 children, but she is also the darkest complected. The Quinns - all different skin shades, all with unknown fathers - live with their charismatic, beautiful, and tyrannical mother, Rozelle, in poverty on the fringes of a Georgia town where Jim Crow rules. Rozelle's children live in fear of her mood swings and her violence, but they are devoted to her. Rozelle pulls her children out of school when they are 12 years old so that they can help support her by going to work.

The Newport Folk Festival provides a groovy backdrop for this drug-and-60s-music-soaked mystery, featuring partners in love and danger, Mick and Bridget, hopping on their motorcycles and into action. As the family of detectives quip, banter, and swing into action, posh Newport is threatened by a perverse, shadowy secret. Mick and Bridget's exuberance and optimism manage to glimmer through even the darkest of perils, as they delve into a seamy world of drugs and sex, and are forced to match wits with both the mob and a shadowy psychopathic killer.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

After enduring a childhood of horrific abuse and crushing poverty, Tucker seeks refuge in her rural Tennessee home. The three grandchildren she is raising are her only connection to the outside, and her demeanor is purposefully rough. But her world is turned upside down when a new neighbor, Ella, moves into the old McDaniel place next door.

Mary Monroe is the author of Essence best-sellers including The Upper Room. Here, she examines the emotional webs that are woven between friends, lovers, and families. Carmen Taylor is absolutely dependable; she feels responsible for everyone she knows. It will take one reckless night to make Carmen realize that she might be able to lay her burdens down and take a chance on real happiness.

Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson ( Pulp Fiction, Star Wars films), fresh off the success of his uproarious, Audie-nominated performance of the mock children’s book Go the F**k to Sleep, delivers a swaggering, darkly-humored rendering of Chester Himes’ classic first novel.

For Vito Corleone, nothing is more important than his family's future. While his youngest children, Michael, Fredo, and Connie, are in school, unaware of their father's true occupation, and his adopted son Tom Hagen is a college student, he worries most about Sonny, his eldest child. Vito pushes Sonny to be a businessman, but Sonny - 17 years old, impatient, and reckless - wants something else: To follow in his father's footsteps and become a part of the real family business.

A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.

Key West, 1991. Don Roy Doyle is back in town. Tough and quick-witted, he's fresh out of prison, where he served three years for a diamond swindle. Now he's back to collect his share of the proceeds, about $200,000, but the money has vanished. A local family dynasty which has controlled the island's politics for generations, a cop with a grudge, the FBI, and the Russian mob all have a stake in the action.

Living in an abandoned apartment building in South-Central L.A., Socrates is one step away from the streets. He bags groceries at the supermarket, collects bottles and cans to recycle for pennies, and feels himself slipping toward invisibility - that is, until he meets 11-year-old Darryl, whose already committed murder and is perilously close to slipping into a life filled with only violence and bloodshed. Socrates' determination to fight for and save Darryl lights his own pathway to self-forgiveness.

Born into a family of modest means and respectability, Danny Fisher was gradually driven downward into the world of crime, racketeering and poverty. His bitterness, his homesickness over the loss of the house in Brooklyn that was given to him for his eighth birthday, and his feud with his harsh father, pulled him one way; his natural decency and his love for a sweet Italian girl, Nellie Petito, pulled him another.

Barlowe, a single African-American in his 40s, shares a ramshackle house with his 20-something nephew in the old Fourth Ward of downtown Atlanta. When Sean and Sandy, a white married couple from Philadelphia, buy and renovate the house next door in anticipation of a neighborhood "turnaround", everyone tries at first to go about their daily business. But fear and suspicion begin to build as more and more new whites move in and make changes, and once familiar people and places disappear.

Mama Black Widow tells the tragic story of Otis Tilson, a stunning black drag queen trapped in a cruel queer ghetto underworld. In hopes of escaping the racial bigotry andeconomic injustice of the South, Otis' family journeys north from their plantation to an urban promised land. Once in Chicago, Otis and his siblings become prisoners to a wasteland of violence, crime, prostitution, and rape. This is the gut-wrenching tale of the destruction of a family and the truest portrayal of homosexuality in the ghetto ever told.

Born into a family of modest means and respectability, Danny Fisher was gradually driven downward into the world of crime, racketeering and poverty. His bitterness, his homesickness over the loss of the house in Brooklyn that was given to him for his eighth birthday, and his feud with his harsh father, pulled him one way; his natural decency and his love for a sweet Italian girl, Nellie Petito, pulled him another.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

In Kenya, when a young American man falls in love with the sophisticated daughter of an African chief, their marriage is strong. But tradition will soon put their union to the supreme test. Gripping and soulful, A Woman's Worth is a tale of cultural divisions, emotional wounds, and a love that struggles to transcend them.

Henry and his wife, Frances, have gone bamboo - living an idyllic, tequila-drenched life as two of the Caribbean's most charming expatriates (and professional assassins). But when Charlie "Wagons" Iannello, a powerful capo with a heart of gold, is relocated to the island under the Federal Witness Protection Program, Henry and Frances' plan suddenly, dangerously falls apart.

Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.

Acclaimed romance author Katie Lane inspires listeners to believe in true love. When Faith Aldridge learns she has a twin sister, she treks to Bramble, Texas, to find her. But Bramble’s residents think Faith is her sister, Hope, and they take action to reunite Faith with Hope’s ex-flame, Slate. When the real Hope finally shows up, Faith pulls out all the stops to hold onto her newfound passion.

Celeste English and Ronnie Frazier are sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Celeste is a doctor's wife, living a perfect and elegant façade. But secretly, her marriage is falling apart and her need to control people around her threatens to destroy them all. Ronnie is an actress, living in New York. But she has no money, she has no home, and her life is held together by "chewing gum, paper clips, and spit." When their father dies, the sisters inherit a house in Prosper, North Carolina.

Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel's emotional nucleus.

I don't even know if love is real. After running from the bastard who brutalized me, I limped back to Arizona, choosing a vibrant college town in the hopes of starting over. I never expected to find him there. Cord Gentry. He and his brothers were tough, lusty forces of nature I'd known since childhood. Years ago Cord seduced me as a sick game. I've hated him ever since. Now here he is again, a man who beats other men bloody for money.

Recent World War II veteran Bull Ingram is working as muscle when a Memphis DJ hires him to find Ramblin' John Hastur. The mysterious blues man's dark, driving music - broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio statio - is said to make living men insane and dead men rise. Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur's trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil.

Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live.

A routine investigation into corruption at a North Californian airport sets in motion shocking events that lead hard man Jim Bishop and world-weary ex-cop boss Scott Weiss into the center of a massive criminal conspiracy. The trail of blood that ensues brings them dangerously closer to Weiss's old nemesis, an expert gun-for-hire known only as Shadowman and to a plan set to climax with an act of audacious violence and a murder that would be impossible for any killer but one....

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

Marshall Karp is an acclaimed playwright known for his witty sense of humor and crackling dialogue. His debut novel The Rabbit Factory stars the irreverent LAPD detective duo of Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs. Dean Lamaar is the architect of an entertainment empire and the creator of iconic characters like Rambunctious Rabbit and McGreedy the Moose.