"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

""Mika, you sit at our feet all these hours and days, hearing us tell our tales. You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write 'em in your books and show everyone who we are." So begins DĽana R.A. Dameron's stunning novel-in-stories, Redwood Court. The baby of the family, Mika Mosby spends much of her time in the care of loved ones, listening to their...

Lupita Nyong'o became an internationally known actor after appearing in 12 Years a Slave, winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie and becoming the first Kenyan and Mexican actor to win in the category. She's gone on to star in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Black Panther, Us, and more. As a college student, Nyong'o saw herself working hard behind the camera instead of in front of it, since she didn't know of any successful...

"Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her...

Publisher Annotation: A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free woman of color who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies. 592pp., 100K

The brutal double murder of renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite, has set London abuzz. Crowds pack the courtroom, the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings. But Frannie Langton claims she cannot recall what happened that evening, how she came to be covered in blood. She does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who...

"Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits - someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom. When big, brooding...

Publisher Annotation: Breakout author Bolu Babalola pens her vibrant debut novel, full of passion, humor, and heart, that centers on a young Black British woman who has no interest in love and unexpectedly finds herself caught up in a fake relationship with the man she warned her girls about. DEBUT NOVEL 368pp., 150K