Told from multiple viewpoints, Shae Tatum, an unarmed, thirteen-year-old black girl, is shot by a white police officer, throwing their community into upheaval and making it a target of demonstrators.

Told from two viewpoints, Atlanta high school seniors Lena and Campbell, one black, one white, must rely on each other to survive after a football rivalry escalates into a riot.

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

In the Dakota Territory in 1880, Four Winds, a ten-year-old Lakota girl, is taken from her family to a boarding school, where she is taught English and expected to assimilate into white culture.

"In 1920 Galway, amid the Irish War of Independence, the daughter of a British landlord becomes an apprentice jeweler to the descendent of the creator of the famed Claddagh ring. As the two learn to work together and see each other in a new light, they start to uncover the true meaning of love, loyalty, and friendship"--

Jacqueline Guidry's debut novel set in 1950s Louisiana was selected for the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program and has been favorably compared to To Kill a Mockingbird. Ten-year-old Vivien Leigh wants more than anything to understand the adult world. But when two black nuns come to teach at her all-white Catholic elementary school, everything begins to change. She and her sister are suddenly exposed to the harsh realities of racial segregation....

In an era of bootlegged whiskey and muddled race relations, faith and medicine are failing the patients at the Waverly Hills tuberculosis sanatorium. Dr. Wolfgang Pike believes music could play a pivotal role in his patients' care--but his boss's disapproval, rising racial tensions, and past memories tear at him.

"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

"The demonic assaults that plagued a young woman in 1930s Mississippi follow her to the 1960s, where she battles to assist the victim of a racially motivated attack"--Provided by the publisher.

Seventeen years after fleeing the Ethiopian revolution, Sepha Stephanos runs a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he reflects on his past and the differences between his prospects and the life he imagined.