A celebrated columnist, nightclub emcee, and fine arts philanthropist draws inspiration from the Catholic Saints Day books to reflect on his encounters with black artists in Detroit's legendary Black Bottom neighborhood, from the Great Depression through the post-World War II years.

"An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother's home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of...

A talented young sculptor hasn't had such a perfect day in May. Killed by her own hammer, at first it looks like an argument with a jealous partner but it soon becomes clear that there is much more to this case than a lovers' quarrel turned fatal. Eve finds herself drawn into the dark and dangerous world of a secret order. A world in which white supremacy, misogyny and religious fanaticism are everyday activities. Eve has dealt with some tough cases...

"A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances...

"A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek's father Buddy Lee...

"I, Maggie Banks, solemnly swear to uphold the rules of Cobblestone Books. If only, I, Maggie Banks, believed in following the rules. When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie...

"The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without...

"A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession,...

In this "tense, twisting mystery" (Megan Miranda), no one bats an eye when a Black reality TV star is found dead--except her estranged half-sister, whose refusal to believe the official story leads her on a dangerous search for the truth. "I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she'd died from the New York Daily News." When the body of disgraced reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found on a playground in the Bronx the...

"Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace survives capture, enslavement, the Atlantic crossing, and a brief stint as a pirate's ward, acting as both a spy and translator. Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born woman. Those skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she tries to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of...