"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize... A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown,...

The late Bill Cosey, one-time owner of the Cosey Hotel and Resort, a hot spot for vacationing African-Americans, is kept alive through the memories of the women he loved and who were loved by him.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, [this book] tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters...

"With more than 3 million copies sold, the #1 New York Times bestseller is now available in a special gift edition. A modern classic, The Help has been a cultural touchstone for the millions of readers who have cheered on Skeeter, laughed with Minny, and hissed at Hilly. The noble and strong Aibileen has become a heroine for countless fans whose letters have poured in from all over the world. Now the bestselling and beloved book is available in a...

"Meet Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean ... Earl's All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed "the Supremes" by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life's storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband's humiliating infidelities. Beautiful,...

"Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard said in The New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." Her new novel has the same power, the same beauty. At its center--a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel--both black,...

"Los Angeles, 1928. An up-and-coming journalist, Daisy Washington anonymously chronicles fierce activism and behind-the-scenes Hollywood scandals to save her family from poverty. But power is also fueled by racism, greed, and betrayal. Chicago, 1968. For Frankie Saunders, fleeing across America is her only escape from an abusive husband. But her rescuer is her Aunt Daisy, still reeling from her own shattered past. Daisy will do whatever it takes to...

"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...

A 12-year-old black girl living with a grandmother in rural Virginia is summoned by her mother to Detroit to clean house and cook while the mother has another baby. The girl is bright and becomes the protegee of a schoolteacher, but her efforts to improve herself create conflict with her mother's needs of her as a housekeeper.