"With all the charm of a clever romantic comedy and peopled by appealing, memorable characters, Carter's first novel is a winner on all fronts." —Booklist, starred review
Davie—an ugly duckling growing up in small-town Mississippi—is positive her life couldn't be any worse. Just when she's resigned herself to her fate, she sees a movie that will change her life—Sixteen Candles. But in her case, life doesn't imitate art. Tormented...

Rachael, whose mother is Danish and father is an African-American, loses both her parents and is forced to move to a new city to live with her strict African-American grandmother, but when she is immersed into an African-American community, her physical appearance draws attention and Rachel struggles with her own uncertainties about her identity.

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts...

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts...

"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...

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life

Seventh-grader Sharkita "Kita" embarks on a tumultuous journey to keep her family together while handling the consequences of her mother's alcoholism.

Co-written by Malcolm X's daughter, this riveting and revealing novel follows the formative years of the man whose words and actions shook the world. Malcolm Little's parents have always told him that he can achieve anything, but from what he can tell, that's a pack of lies--after all, his father's been murdered, his mother's been taken away, and his dreams of becoming a lawyer have gotten him laughed out of school. There's no point in trying, he...

Octogenarian Addy Shadd, having grown up in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves in the 1800s, finds the memories of her early life returning to her when she is left to care for a five-year-old mixed race child who has already suffered some hardships of her own.