A beautiful, engrossing novel that illuminates some of the most important and troubling issues of our time, The Mother is a moving portrait of love, tragedy, and survival--and the aftershocks from a momentary act of cruel violence that transforms the lives of everyone it touches.
Contemporary
Rendon, Marcie R.
9781941026526
2017
Nineteen-year-old Renee 'Cash' Blackbear has survived the bleak reality of the foster care system but continues to struggle against the discrimination that her Ojibwe background elicits in 1970s Fargo, North Dakota. When an Ojibwe man is found murdered, and Cash starts to dream of the dead man's life, she teams up with her one friend and guardian, Sheriff Wheaton, to discover the killer. First in a series.
by Chang-rae Lee
1587242893
1995
A clash of ethnic and professional loyalties is the subject of this novel. The protagonist is a Korean-American who works for a private intelligence service and is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician. To blow the whistle on a fellow ethnic would hurt his tribe, on the other hand there is his professional reputation to consider.
Guillory, Jasmine
9780593100820
2020
Up and coming LA lawyer Olivia Monroe feels too busy to date, but a chance meeting with a handsome stranger changes her mind. When she learns too late that he's Max Powell, California's hotshot junior senator, she's surprised to find that he's not the white privileged politician she thought he was. But when they go public with their relationship, Olivia has to cope with the intense scrutiny of her past, her status as a trophy girlfriend, and frank discussions with Max about race. Olivia and Max know they have something special, but can they survive the spotlight?
by Natalie Baszile
9780670026135
2014
A mother-daughter story of reinvention--about an African American woman who unexpectedly inherits a sugarcane farm in Louisiana.
Due, Tananarive
9781982188344
2023
In the Jim Crow South, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., who can see ghosts, is sent to The Reformatory where boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, while his sister Gloria rallies everyone in Florida to get him out before it's too late.
by Mohsin Hamid
9780151013043
2007
Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite "valuation" firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his infatuation with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past.
by Louise Erdrich
9780062065247
2012
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
by Paul Beatty
9780374260507
2015
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality--the black Chinese restaurant.
by Victoria Christopher Murray
9781476792996
2015
Janice Johnson's 16-year-old son was murdered and the shooter hasn't been arrested. Shelly Vance's husband is facing murder charges for shooting a teenager who he says attacked him in a parking lot. This tragedy is magnified by the racial divide it has created. She wants to stand by her man, but she's keeping a secret that could blow the case wide open. Alax Wilson is the jury foreman. Faced with a dramatic trial that has turned into a media frenzy, Janice, Shelly and Alax are forced to face their own prejudices.
by Jason Overstreet
9781496701763
2016
For college graduate Sidney Temple, the Roaring Twenties bring opportunities even members of his accomplished black bourgeois family couldn't have imagined. His impulsive marriage to independent artist Loretta is a happiness he never thought he'd find. And when he's tapped by J. Edgar Hoover to be the FBI's first African-American agent, he sees a once-in-a-lifetime chance to secure real justice.
by Tommy Orange
9780525520375
2018
A novel which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans; with an inheritance of profound spirituality; and with a plague of addiction, abuse and suicide, follows 12 characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow.--Novelist
by Joseph Boyden
0670034312
2005
Set in Canada and the battlefields of France and Belgium, Three-Day Road is a mesmerizing novel told through the eyes of Niskaa Canadian Oji-Cree woman living off the land who is the last of a line of healers and divinersand her nephew Xavier.
by Colson Whitehead
9780385542364
2016
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Winner of the 2016 National Book Award.
Canas, Isabel
9780593436721
2023
Nena's ranching family has long been threatened by Anglo settlers from the north pushing into northern Mexico's lands. But when Nena finds herself in the thick of battle at the dawn of the Mexican-American War, she finds the enemy has a weapon far more frightening than cannons and guns.
by Brit Bennett
9780525536291
2020
Two twin sisters, inseperable as children, run away from home. As adults, they choose to live in very different worlds--one living as an African American in her hometown, and the other hides her past from her family in order to pass as white.
by Zinzi Clemmons
9780735221710
2017
Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor--someone, or something, to love.
Cole, Alyssa
9780062982650
2020
In Alyssa Cole's unflinching thriller, members of a historically Black Brooklyn neighborhood begin disappearing from their highly desirable brownstone homes, only to be replaced by wealthy White residents. Longtime Black resident Sydney teams with her new White neighbor Theo, who has secrets of his own, to discover that the horrifying truth behind the disappearances is an all too familiar story of systemic and economic racism.
Hobson, Brandon
9781616958879
2018
Sequoyah, a 15 year old Cherokee boy, is housed with a foster family when his mother is jailed. Traumatized by past events, he keeps his feelings to himself--at least until he meets Rosemary, another Native American teen in the foster system.
Casares, Oscar
9780525655435
2019
Twelve-year-old Orly is sent to live with his godmother in Brownsville, Texas, when he discovers that she is harboring an illegal immigrant in her backyard--Daniel, a twelve-year old boy bound for Chicago in search of his mother.
Weiden, David Heska Wanbli
9780062968944
2020
On South Dakota's Rosebud Lakota reservation, Virgil Wounded Horse uses his fists to give local families with the sort of vigilante justice that federal courts can't or won't offer. But when drug dealers encroach onto the reservation and hit too close too home, Virgil discovers a sense of justice might come at a terrible price.