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BEBE’S
BY GOLLY WOW
by Yolanda Joe. Bebe finds love again when
she meets Isaac, a firefighter who’s raising
his 13-year-old headstrong daughter. A sequel to
He Say She Say.
BLACK
AJAX
by George Macdonald Fraser. Based on the
life of Tom Molineaux, a slave who boxed his way to
freedom in the early 1800s.
BLESSINGS
by Sheneska Jackson. A
blessing to one is not necessarily good fortune to
another, as four friends find out when they are
torn apart by the fantasies and realities of
motherhood.
BLUE
COLLAR BLUES
by Rosalyn McMillan. A Detroit auto plant
is the setting; murder and passion drive the
plot.
BLUE
LIGHT: Prelude to the Invasion
of Light Trilogy
by Walter Mosley. A futuristic novel by
the author of the Easy Rawlins mystery
series.
BY
THE LIGHT OF MY FATHER’S SMILE
by Alice Walker. The first new novel in
six years by the author of The Color
Purple.
CAUCASIA
by Danzy Senna. Separated since their
parents’ divorce, fair-skinned Birdie searches
for her dark-skinned sister in 1970s
Boston.
CEREUS
BLOOMS AT NIGHT
by Shani Mootoo. Cereus is a murder
suspect in the Paradise Arms House, where her
unlikely confidant is a vivacious male nurse.
*CHEEKIE:
A Child out of the Desire
by Clarence Nero. For Cheekie, who was
conceived and born out of wedlock, the New Orleans
housing project where she lives, "The Desire," does
not live up to its name.
CHILDHOOD
by Andre Alexis. Middle-aged and living in
Canada, Thomas looks back on his childhood and what
he learned &endash; about the games of power and
romance played between his mother and the man who
may or may not have been his father.
A
DO RIGHT MAN
by Omar Tyree. Bobby Dallas is finally
ready to make a commitment and that should be easy
. . . right?
DON’T
ERASE ME: Stories
by Carolyn Ferrell. Often invisible, poor
minority teens are determined to survive despite
adversity.
DREAMER
by Charles Johnson. What if Martin Luther
King, Jr. had a double?
EASTER
LILLY: A Novel of the South
by Tom Wicker. Can a young black woman on
trial for the murder of a white jail guard receive
a fair trial?
THE
EDGE OF HEAVEN
by Marita Golden. A middle-class family
copes with the death of a child and the
imprisonment of the mother.
FARADAY’S
POPCORN FACTORY
by Sandra Lee Gould. Is Willow’s new
love truly an alien as her grandmother
suspects?
THE
FARMING OF BONES
by Edwidge Danticat. Amabelle and
Sebastien, Haitians living in the Dominican
Republic, are planning their future; then Trujillo
begins the slaughter. Based on a true
incident.
FEVER
SEASON
by Barbara Hambly. It is New Orleans, and
freedmen are disappearing after a white couple is
poisoned. The sequel to A Free Man of
Color.
FLICKERING
SHADOWS
by Kwadwo Agymah Kamau. Even with
one of their own as prime minister, the people of a
Caribbean island find that self determination does
not bring freedom from political and religious
corruption.
FREEDOMLAND
by Richard Price. A black detective is
skeptical of a woman who claims that her son was
kidnapped during a carjacking.
GOOD
FENCES
by Erika Ellis. Being black and living in
a white world carries a high price as the Spader
family discovers.
THE
HEALING
by Gayl Jones. Harlan Jane Eagleton, a
faith healer, travels from town to town working her
miracles, knowing she also has to heal
herself.
I
CAN’T WAIT ON GOD
by Albert French. She murders her pimp,
steals his Buick, and with her boyfriend heads for
New York City.
IRON
SHADOWS
by Steven Barnes. Is the New Age cult,
which private investigator Cat Spaulding and her
partner Jax are investigating, really controlled by
aliens?
THE
ITCH
by Benilde Little. It’s
what they get when wealthy 30-somethings get
everything they say they wanted.
KIRINYAGA:
A Fable of Utopia
by Michael Resnick. Koriba is determined
to build a "Utopian" colony, not on earth but on
the terraformed planetoid.
LADY
MOSES
by Lucinda Roy. A biracial British
woman travels first to America and then to Africa
in search of happiness and security.
THE
LAST OF THE AFRICAN KINGS
by Maryse Conde. From African royalty to
the Caribbean to present-day United States. A
family saga.
LENOIR:
A Novel
by Ken Greenhall. The subject of
Rubens’s 17th-century painting,
"Four Heads of a Negro," is brought to
life.
*A
LIFE FOR A LIFE
by Ernest Hill. Fifteen-year-old
D’Ray Reid robs a convenience store when a
drug dealer threatens to kill his younger brother
if he doesn’t come up with $100.
LOVE
IS A RACKET
by John Ridley. Everything’s a racket
for Jeffty Kittridge, a thirty-seven-year-old
ex-wannabe scriptwriter living on the skids in
Hollywood.
MEN
OF BREWSTER PLACE
by Gloria Naylor. A revisit to the
fictional inner city neighborhood where there is
"an endless supply of I could, I shoulda, but I
didn’t." Told this time
from the perspective of its sons and
husbands.
THE
MONKEY SUIT and Other Short Fiction on African
Americans and Justice
by David Dante Troutt. Ten classic
fictionalized legal cases involving
African-Americans.
*MR.
DREAM MERCHANT
by Erroll J. Bailey. The spiritual entity,
Jr. Dream Merchant, guides a teenager through
difficult times.
NOTHING
BUT THE RENT
by Sharon Mitchell. An unexpected crisis
convinces four women that they have been looking
for love in all the wrong places.
ONE
MUST WAIT
by Penny Mickelbury. A disillusioned
criminal defense lawyer decides to investigate her
husband’s murder.
THE
PAGODA
by Patricia Powell. A Chinese man
who fled to Jamaica in the 1890s writes to his
estranged daughter to explain his life as it nears
its end.
PARADISE
by Toni Morrison. When the outside
world intrudes, the community of Ruby, once a
paradise, is forced into a tragic
confrontation.
*PLENTY
GOOD ROOM
by Teresa McClain-Watson. Traumatized by
witnessing his brother’s murder, 13-year-old
Bay Dawson is sent from Harlem to
Florida.
PRIDE
by Lorene Cary. Can a life-long friendship
between four women survive after the
revelation of a long-kept secret?
RING
AROUND THE MOON
by Mary Burnett Smith. Looking back to the
year she was ten, a woman recalls the effects of
her family’s move to a new town and her
father’s infidelity.
THE
RIVER WHERE BLOOD IS BORN
by Sandra Jackson-Opoku. One family’s
journey over three centuries from ancient Africa to
contemporary America.
SECRETS
by Nuruddin Farah. During the Civil War in
Somalia, Kalaman’s childhood sweetheart
returns, asking him to father her child, which
opens the floodgates to long-kept family
skeletons.
SINGING
IN THE COMEBACK CHOIR
by Bebe Moore Campbell. Should Maxine give
up her career as a Los Angeles TV producer for her
grandmother and the crumbling Philadelphia
neighborhood where she grew up?
SINGLE
MOM
by Omar Tyree. Denise Stewart finds
herself involved with both of her sons’
fathers, as well as in a relationship with a new
man.
SOLIBO
MAGNIFICENT
by Patrick Chamoiseau. A legendary
storyteller in Martinique is discovered dead of
unknown causes. Did one of his friends murder him,
or was he choked by his own words?
STIGMATA
by Phyllis Alesia Perry. Through
out-of-body experiences, Lizzie relives her
great-grand-mother’s experiences as a
slave.
THE
STORE OF A MILLION ITEMS: Stories
by Michelle Cliff, the Jamaican
author.
TAMING
IT DOWN
by Kim McLarin. Hope is a woman with every
reason to be mad. Her editor thinks she got her job
merely because she’s black, her white lover
dumps her for a blonde, and her African-American
boyfriend considers her a traitor to the race.
TEMPEST
RISING
by Diane McKinney-Whetstone. The escape of
three sisters from their nightmarish foster home
forces their caregivers to move beyond the abuse
that had characterized their relationships.
TWO
CITIES
by John Edgar Wideman. A woman who has
lost her husband to AIDS and her two sons to
the streets must find a way to heal
herself.
UP
JUMPED THE DEVIL
by Blair S. Walker. Neo-Nazis threaten to
bomb the NAACP’s national
headquarters.
VOODOO
CHILD
by Michael Reaves. "Murder and dark magic
prowl the New Orleans streets."
THE
WAKE OF THE WIND
by J. California Cooper. The cataclysmic
effects of post Reconstruction Era lynchings and
injustice to a family of freedmen.
WALKING
THROUGH MIRRORS
by Brian Keith Jackson. Returning to
Louisiana for his father’s funeral, a
successful New York photographer searches for the
reason for his abandonment as an infant.
WHAT
LOOKS LIKE CRAZY ON AN ORDINARY DAY
by Pearl Cleage. Ava finds that HIV is not
a death sentence but a new beginning, thanks to her
sister, her new man, and a group of troubled
teenagers.
WHISTLE:
A Novel
by Janice Daugharty. A black man discovers
a white woman’s body and is blackmailed by his
mother.
WHITE
BOYS: Short Stories
by Reginald McKnight. Racism is part of
daily life in these stories that explore the
complexities of crossing the racial
divide.
ZACHARY’S
WINGS
by Rosemarie Robotham. What begins as a
passionate affair for Zachary and Korie becomes
increasingly troubled when secrets are revealed.
MYSTERIES
THE
BEST DEFENSE
by Ellis Cose. A lawyer takes a case
defending a white client accused of killing his
Latino office colleague.
BLANCHE
CLEANS UP
by Barbara Neely. The third book in
Neely’s series features Roxbury’s Blanche
White discovering a cover-up in the murder of a
black youth.
CAT-EYED
TROUBLE
by Robert Skinner. Wesley Farrell passes
for white and owns a nightclub in New Orleans
during the Depression.
A
DARKER SHADE OF CRIMSON: An Ivy League Mystery
by Pamela Thomas-Graham. A Harvard
professor turns sleuth when she stumbles upon a
dead body during a blackout.
EASIER
TO KILL
NO HIDING PLACE
by Valerie Wilson Wesley. Two new
entries in the Tamara Hayle mystery
series.
EYE
OF THE CRICKET: A Lew Griffin Novel
by James Sallis. The fourth book in the
Lew Griffin series finds the detective searching
for his missing son.
KILLING
THE LAWYERS: A Joe Sixsmith Mystery
by Reginald Hill. His meeting with a
lawyer ends in a shouting match; when the lawyer is
murdered, Joe becomes a suspect.
SEE
NO EVIL: A Marti MacAlister Mystery
by Eleanor Taylor Bland. Detective Marti
MacAlister investigates the death of a female drug
addict, while a stalker plans to kill her, her
family, and her housemates.
SHADES
OF JUSTICE
by Linda McKeever Bullard. An aspiring
judge is being blackmailed by her best
friend’s husband with whom she had an
affair.
THE
SILENT CRADLE
by Margaret Cuthbert. An obstetrician
fears that many patients being referred to her have
fetuses that have been deliberately
harmed.
WHAT
A WOMAN’S GOTTA DO: A Novel of Suspense
by Evelyn Coleman. After her fiancÈ
fails to show up at their wedding and her car is
found covered with blood, Patricia is suspected of
murder.
WHEN
LAST SEEN ALIVE: An Aaron Gunner Mystery
by Gar Anthony Haywood. What happened to
Elroy Covington who never returned from the Million
Man March?
*Recommended
for Teens
This
selected list was compiled by: Kendall
Brothers, General Library, Teen Services;
Moonyean Carlton, General Library, Adult Reader and
Information Services; Marylou Coveney, Dudley
Branch; Janice Knight, Mattapan Branch; Amy Manson, Jamaica Plain Branch;
Sarah Markell, Charlestown Branch; Jacquelyn Hogan, Chairperson,
Grove Hall Branch Libraries. Boston Public
Library, 1999.
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