Starting the Conversation: Adult Fiction

In our commitment to serve our community and foster the pursuit of knowledge, we offer these resources to help begin important conversations.

Showing 1 - 20 of 26  There are a total of 42 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "An American marriage"
Star rating for An American marriage
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control"--
Book cover for "Americanah"
Star rating for Americanah
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"--
Book cover for "Another Brooklyn"
Star rating for Another Brooklyn
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything--until it wasn't."--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "Calling Me Home"
Star rating for Calling Me Home
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:

A soaring debut interweaving the story of a heartbreaking, forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship

Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser, Dorrie Curtis. It's a big one. Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mother in her thirties, to drop everything and drive her from her home in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati—with no clear explanation why—tomorrow.

...
Book cover for "Cry, the beloved country"
Star rating for Cry, the beloved country
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A novel depicting the racial ferment in the beautiful country of South Africa in 1948
Book cover for "The darkest child"
Star rating for The darkest child
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
"A new edition of this award-winning modern classic, with new introduction, excerpt, and discussion guide Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle's, estimation, but she's also the brightest. Rozelle--beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned--exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment,...
Book cover for "Giovanni's room"
Star rating for Giovanni's room
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality."--Page 4 of cover.
Book cover for "Go set a watchman"
Star rating for Go set a watchman
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
This book is an historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Go Set a Watchman...
Book cover for "The hate u give"
Star rating for The hate u give
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
After witnessing her friend's death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter's life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died. "Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal...

11. Home

Book cover for "Home"
Star rating for Home
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The story of a Korean war veteran on a quest to save his younger sister"--
Book cover for "Homegoing"
Star rating for Homegoing
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...
Book cover for "Internment"
Star rating for Internment
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
A terrifying, futuristic United Sates where Muslim-Americans are forced into internment camps, and seventeen-year-old Layla Amin must lead a revolution against complicit silence.
Book cover for "Mudbound"
Star rating for Mudbound
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississipi Delta.
Book cover for "Native son"
Star rating for Native son
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright's novel is just as powerful today as when it was written -- in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what...
Book cover for "The nickel boys"
Star rating for The nickel boys
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

17. Passing

Book cover for "Passing"
Star rating for Passing
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TESSA THOMPSON AND RUTH NEGGA
Two women in 1920s New York discover how fluid and dangerous our perceptions of race can be in this electrifying classic of the Harlem Renaissance—with an introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
“The genius of this book is that its protagonists . . . are complex
...
Book cover for "Red at the bone"
Star rating for Red at the bone
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other. Moving forward and backward in time, [the] novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child"--Publisher marketing.
Book cover for "Salvage the bones"
Star rating for Salvage the bones
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
Book cover for "Sing, unburied, sing"
Star rating for Sing, unburied, sing
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"Jojo and his toddler sister Kayla live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother Leonie on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children...