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 - 17 of 17  There are a total of 42 valid entries on the list.
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 "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 "The coldest winter ever"
Star rating for The coldest winter ever
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
After a black drug dealer goes to jail in Brooklyn, his ruthless 17-year-old daughter takes over his empire. A look at the mores and manners of the black underclass, this one with money. First novel by a hip-hop artist, author of No Disrespect. Winter Santiaga, the daughter of one of Brooklyn's most powerful drug czars, uses her own weapons--including sex and an aggressive attitude--to stay on top, after her father's empire is threatened by a drug...
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 "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...

8. 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 "Lakewood"
Star rating for Lakewood
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A ... debut novel that delves ... into the taboo subject of modern-day medical experimentation on African Americans"--
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 "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.
Book cover for "The other Americans"
Star rating for The other Americans
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of The Moor's Account--a timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a...
Book cover for "Real life"
Star rating for Real life
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...
Book cover for "A time to kill"
Star rating for A time to kill
Series:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
Following the brutal rape of his ten-year-old daughter, Carl Lee Haily, a black man living in a small Mississippi town, kills the two white men accused of the crime A Southern town is shocked when a 10-year-old black girl is raped by two white men--until the girl's father takes the law into his own hands.
Book cover for "To kill a mockingbird"
Star rating for To kill a mockingbird
Author:
Series:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee exploreswith rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The vanishing half"
Star rating for The vanishing half
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...