A worldwide best-seller when it was first published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty.

Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, and his son, Absalom. Set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s, it is also the story of a land and a people driven by racial injustice. The book is written with such

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"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

"John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft--Fay and Carl's dead father--and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take...

Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human--fear, love, shame, need, and loneliness.

The trhilling follow-up to the award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird: Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on the hunt for a boy who's gone missing - but the boy's family of white supremacists is the real target. Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have headed home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes black. Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind...

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

A landmark in American fiction, Light in August published in 1932, explores Faulkner's central theme: the nature of evil. Joe Christmas-a man doomed, deracinated and alone-wanders the Deep South in search of an identity, and a place in society. After killing his perverted God-fearing lover, it becomes inevitable that he is, pursued by a lynch-hungry mob. Yet after the sacrifice, there is new life, a determined ray of light in Faulkner's complex and...

"There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel." — New York Times

Set in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.

Mary Turner is a self-confident,

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"When Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California, they hope to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to fit in. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists...

When an African American family with three children moves into her white neighborhood, eleven-year-old Winnie learns the difference between being a good neighbor and being a good friend.