Karen Murray

The Quincy Valley is a unique place with a distinct environment. In the beginning, not even the local Columbia River tribes could find a use for the sagebrush desert, home to jackrabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes, but by 1910, immigrants from more than 20 nations called it home. Today the technology of the 21st century knocks on its door. From the early days of dry-land farming, to the abundant orchards and crops nourished by the Grand Coulee Dam,...

With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.

"The first definitive exploration of the role of the twenty-first century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden and the evolution of the First Lady's role from ceremonial figurehead to political operative--from a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Since the Clinton era, tectonic shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have...

"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...

Strong, sassy, always surprising-and titled after a Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update" monologue by Tina Fey-Bitch Is the New Black is a deliciously addictive memoir-in-essays in which Helena Andrews goes from being the daughter of the town lesbian to a hot-shot political reporter… all while trying to answer the question, "can a strong, single, and successful black woman ever find love?" Fans of Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There'd Be Cake) will...

"This novel maps the romantic history and emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love. Monster in the Middle moves from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple's romance is influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing"--

"From the visionary author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, an epic novel tracing the conception and construction of a colossal statue--and the lives of two centuries of immigrants navigating its turbulent wake. "Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer who, with each ever more triumphant book, creates a new language with which she writes the audacious stories only she can tell," Roxane Gay has written. Now, Yuknavitch bridges the nineteenth...