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 21 - 40 of 42  There are a total of 42 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Light it up"
Star rating for Light it up
Description:
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.
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.
Book cover for "No one is coming to save us"
Star rating for No one is coming to save us
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
Book cover for "Not without laughter"
Star rating for Not without laughter
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...

28. 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
...

29. Push

Book cover for "Push"
Star rating for Push
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African American girl living in Harlem who was raped and left pregnant for the second time by her father
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 "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 "The revisioners"
Star rating for The revisioners
Average Rating:
3 stars
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 "The sellout"
Star rating for The sellout
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court"-- "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...
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...
Book cover for "Such a fun age"
Star rating for Such a fun age
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar....
Book cover for "Things fall apart"
Star rating for Things fall apart
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
The contemporary African writer's classic novel depicting the destruction of traditional tribal life by the white man.
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...