The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is African-American writer Charles Chesnutt's debut novel. Inspired by his own experience as a Black man capable of passing for white-which Chesnutt consciously chose not to do-as well as by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, The House Behind the Cedars explores themes of identity, race, and class in the post-Civil War South. Controversial for its portrayal of interracial romance, Chesnutt's novel was critically acclaimed...

Looking for adventure in her life, Harriet, the Duchess of Berrow, dresses as a man and accompanies other nobles to the estate of Lord Justinian Strange, where he hosts a rollicking fete that would mean scandal to any proper lady. When the two finally meet, they fall in love, but can he see past all her disguises?

A reimagining of the fairy tale Snow White recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty, the opposite of the life she's left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a...

Set before the Civil War, in the first half of the nineteenth century, this novel of Mark Twain's delves into the ironies of racial prejudice. A young would-be lawyer, Wilson, sets out to solve a murder using the (at that time) unproven method of fingerprinting. Thought to be a simpleton or 'puddenhead', he eventually makes his critics look like puddenheads themselves. The main focus of the novel, however, deals with the identities of two young...

Bennie Rosato looks exactly like her identical twin, Alice Connelly, but the darkness in Alice's soul makes them two very different women. Or at least that's what Bennie believes, until she finds herself buried alive at the hands of her twin. Alice underestimates Bennie, though, and the evil she has unleashed in her twin's psyche, as well as Bennie's determination to stay alive long enough to exact revenge.

Marty McKidrict and Stuart Brodie are outcasts in the turbulent colonial backcountry of the 1780s. Trying to escape a brutal, sadistic husband, McKidrict disguises herself as a man and reluctantly joins the Patriot cause led by John Sevier and the Overmountain Men. Meanwhile, Brodie, a freedman, joins the Loyalists after Brodie's brother is lynched by a gang of Patriot renegades. In the heat of the American Revolution, fate will bring the two together...

When white silver screen icon Kitty Karr Tate dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the three Black St. John sisters, it prompts questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty's affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty's journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could-and between a cheating fiancé and fallout from a controversial social...

Pittsburgh, 1995. The son of a black father he's never known and a white mother he sometimes wishes he didn't, twenty-two-year-old Bobby Saraceno is passing for white. Raised by his bigoted maternal grandfather, Bobby has hidden his truth from everyone, even his best friend and fellow comic-book geek, Aaron, who has just returned home from prison a hardened racist. Bobby's disparate worlds collide when his and Aaron's reunion is interrupted by a confrontation...

In 1861 the Civil War reached the mountainous South--where the enemy was you neighbor, the victims were your friends, and the wrong army was whichever one you joined. When Malinda Blalock's husband, Keith, joined the army, she dressed as a boy and went with him. They spent the war close to home in the North Carlina mountains, acting as Union guerilla fighters, raiding the farms of Confederate sympathizers making as much trouble as they could locally....

A sweeping novel that juxtaposes the legends of the Civil War with the lives of the modern-day mountain folk.