The extraordinary story of Jessie Redmon Fauset, whose passion and genius created the community of friends and rivals that became the Harlem literary Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
When Jessie Redmon Fauset arrives in Harlem in 1919, something is stirring. Against the pervasive racism and discrimination that pulses throughout the country, there is this little corner in America called Harlem where Black is beautiful. Black pride is evident everywhere—in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. As the new literary editor of Crisis magazine, Jessie aspires to bring this sense of pride to literature.
Her boss and founder of the preeminent Negro magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois charges her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. And Jessie’s triumph is almost instant. She meets sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen in church, and seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes when he submits his high school graduation photograph to the magazine; she and Nella Larsen become best friends…she even mentors Zora Neale Hurston. Crisis becomes known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories. And it isn’t the writers alone who are celebrated. Jessie shines as well, becoming famous in publishing circles.
However, W. E. B. is not only Jessie’s mentor, but also her lover—and their torrid and tumultuous affair, despite their fourteen-year-age difference and in spite of him being very married, threatens all Jessie has achieved. From the beginning, Jessie has harbored a secret desire—to become the editor of the Crisis. But W. E. B. has no intention of ever walking away from the magazine—and the woman—he loves. In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie has realized unparalleled success and to preserve her legacy she’ll have to stand her ground once more to capture what her heart desires most.
A wandering fortune teller finds an unexpected family in this warm and wonderful debut fantasy, perfect for readers of Travis Baldree and Sangu Mandanna.
Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells “small” fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences…
Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child. Soon, they’re joined by a baker with a knead for adventure, and—of course—a slightly magical cat.
Tao sets down a new path with companions as big-hearted as her fortunes are small. But as she lowers her walls, the shadows of her past are closing in—and she’ll have to decide whether to risk everything to preserve the family she never thought she could have.
In this Southern gothic horror debut, a young Black woman abandons her life in 1960s Chicago for a position with a mysterious family in New Orleans, only to discover the dark truth: They’re under a curse, and they think she can break it.
In the fall of 1962, twenty-seven-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago—and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over.
But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Their tenuous hold on reality extends to all the members of their eccentric clan, from haughty grandmother Honorine to beautiful yet inscrutable cousin Fosette. And soon the shocking truth comes out: The Duchons are under a curse. And they think Jemma has the power to break it.
As Jemma wrestles with the gift she’s run from all her life, she unravels deeper and more disturbing secrets about the mysterious Duchons. Secrets that stretch back over a century. Secrets that bind her to their fate if she fails.
A propulsive, extraordinary novel about a mother and her daughters’ harrowing escape to Taiwan as the Communist revolution sweeps through China, by debut author Eve J. Chung, based on her family story
Daughters are the Ang family’s curse.
In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother—abused by the family for failing to birth a boy—finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the Communist army closes in on their town, the rest of the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they view them as useless mouths to feed.
Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family’s crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing the worst is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless but resourceful, they forge travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them.
From the countryside to the bustling city of Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing tide of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they’ve known also comes new freedom—to take hold of their fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story.
Told in assured, evocative prose, with impeccably drawn characters, Daughters of Shandong is a hopeful, powerful story about the resilience of women in war; the enduring love between mothers, daughters, and sisters; and the sacrifices made to lift up future generations.
A hypnotic, sinister debut mystery about a seemingly good cop who is secretly the daughter of a notorious serial killer. Anna Koray escaped her father’s darkness long ago. When she was a girl, her childhood memories were sealed away from her conscious mind by a controversial hypnosis treatment. She’s now a decorated sheriff’s lieutenant serving a rural county, conducting an ordinary life far from her father’s shadow. When Anna kills a man in the line of duty, her suppressed memories return. She dreams of her beloved father, his hands red with blood, surrounded by flower-decked corpses he had sacrificed to the god of the forest. To Anna’s horror, a serial killer emerges who is copying her father and who knows who she really is. Is her father still alive, or is this the work of another? Will the killer expose her, destroying everything she has built for herself? Does she want him to? But as she haunts the forest, using her father’s tricks to hunt the killer, will she find what she needs most—or lose herself in the gathering darkness?
With three months until liftoff, a struggling event planner and a sinfully hot astronaut must decide if their fake relationship is worth a shot at happily-ever-after. Risk-averse event planner Amerie Price is jobless, newly single, and about to be evicted. With no choice but to gamble on her shaky start-up, the last thing she needed was to run into her smug ex and his new, less complicated girlfriend at her favorite coffee shop. Panicked, Amerie pretends to be dating the annoyingly sexy man she met by spilling Americano all over his abs. He plays along—for a price. Half the single men in Houston claim to be astronauts, but Vincent Rogers turns out to be the real deal. What started as a one-off lie morphs into a plan: for the three months leading up to his mission, Amerie will play Vincent’s doting partner in front of his loving but overly-invested family. In exchange, she gets a rent-free room in his house and can put every penny towards her struggling business. What Amerie doesn’t plan for is Vincent’s gravitational pull. While her mind tells her a future with this astronaut is too unpredictable, her heart says he’s exactly what she needs. As their time together counts down, Amerie must decide if she’ll settle for the safe life—or shoot for the stars.
Sparks fly when an occult expert and a disgraced archeologist become enemies-with-benefits in this steamy romance from “go-to” author Rosie Danan (The New York Times Book Review). Riley Rhodes finally has the chance to turn her family’s knack for the supernatural into a legitimate business when she’s hired to break the curse on an infamous Scottish castle. Used to working alone in her alienating occupation, she’s pleasantly surprised to meet a handsome stranger upon arrival—until he tries to get her fired. Fresh off a professional scandal, Clark Edgeware can’t allow a self-proclaimed “curse breaker” to threaten his last chance for redemption. After he fails to get Riley kicked off his survey site, he vows to avoid her. Unfortunately for him, she vows to get even. Riley expects the curse to do her dirty work by driving Clark away, but instead, they keep finding themselves in close proximity. Too close. Turns out, the only thing they do better than fight is fool around. If they’re not careful, by the end of all this, more than the castle will end up in ruins.
True love is at stake in this charming, debut romantic comedy. Cassie Greenberg loves being an artist, but it’s a tough way to make a living. On the brink of eviction, she’s desperate when she finds a too-good-to-be-true apartment in a beautiful Chicago neighborhood. Cassie knows there has to be a catch—only someone with a secret to hide would rent out a room for that price. Of course, her new roommate Frederick J. Fitzwilliam is far from normal. He sleeps all day, is out at night on business, and talks like he walked out of a regency romance novel. He also leaves Cassie heart-melting notes around the apartment, cares about her art, and asks about her day. And he doesn’t look half bad shirtless, on the rare occasions they’re both home and awake. But when Cassie finds bags of blood in the fridge that definitely weren’t there earlier, Frederick has to come clean: Cassie’s sexy new roommate is a vampire. And he has a proposition for her.
A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women: one of them her sister.
There are secrets in the land. As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land’s Indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Even though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister’s disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women. But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her back. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing Indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd. The truth will be unearthed.
The boy who couldn’t love and the girl who wouldn’t. Ginny Murphy is a total guy’s girl. She’s always found friendships with boys easier to form and keep drama-free — as long as they don’t fall for her, and she doesn’t fall for them. She and her best guy friends have stuck to that. But then she meets Adrian Silvas, the only one who’s ever made her crave more, and Ginny begins to question her own rules. Piece by piece, Ginny and Adrian begin to fall into something intoxicating, something dangerous. Ginny threatens to destroy the belief Adrian’s held ever since witnessing his own mother’s heartbreak: that love isn’t worth the risk. For Ginny, the stakes could be even higher. Letting Adrian get close could mean exposing a secret she’s long protected: her disordered eating. Ginny isn’t looking to be saved by someone. But maybe she and Adrian can help each other — if they don’t destroy each other first. Heartfelt and evocative, Guy’s Girl is a powerful story about true love, self-love, and growing up.
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