Macon Dead, Jr., called "Milkman," the son of the wealthiest African American in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality. Winn...

When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sister, Cee. After the war, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger.Frank is a modern Odyss...

Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her own daughter Beloved with a handsaw to prevent her from being claimed as a slave in this stunningly rendered story. Beloved returns to her mother as a ghost 20 years later.

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In th...

The arrival of an ominous black stranger disturbs the precisely choreographed interactions among the five people living in a beautiful house on a Caribbean island--a millionaire candy manufacturer, his wife, and their servants--in a n...

Toni Morrison's eighth novel centers on the Cosey family. Bill Cosey rose from poverty to become the millionaire owner of a prosperous resort. His son, Billy Boy, and Billy's daughter, Christine, have opposing views about the place. A...

At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the s...

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes w...

The unnamed omniscient narrator--like a Greek chorus, or a tribal storyteller--relates the story of Joe and Violet Trace, a pair of orphans who meet and marry in rural Virginia, then come north to Harlem in 1906. Trapped in their unfu...