"This book is the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, " We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved...

This fourth autobiographical work by Maya Angelou tells of her entry into New York's circle of black artists and writers, her involvement in the civil rights movement, and changes in her personal life.

For fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights, the unprepossessing and saturnine Forentino Ariza, one of the three central characters of this incomparable novel, waits to possess Fermina Daza, the young woman who once promised him her love and then, in a moment of blinding but ambiguous insight, refused him. To while away the long years of his vigil, he enters into six hundred and twenty-two liaisons and "countless fleeting adventures."...

In the backwoods of Mississippi, Jewel and her husband are truly blessed; they have five fine children. When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how an unforeseen event can set us on a co.

Tells the story of Marie Fermoyle, a lonely divorcee, who in the summer of 1960 falls prey to a dangerous con man while struggling to keep her family together against a variety of obstacles.

Cut off from the hospital and rescue squad by an ice storm, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes the decision to perform a cesarean section on a patient she believes has died of a stroke during labor, but when her assistant tells police the mother was alive during the surgery, Sibyl and the entire community are drawn into a gripping trial. Told in the mesmerizing voice of the midwife's daughter, Midwives depicts the aftermath of the tragedy.

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.

Ria lives a charmed life with her adoring husband and two young children. She fills their large Dublin house with the warmth of gourmet cooking and company. But when the charm breaks, and her husband leaves her for a young, pregnant girlfriend, Ria makes an impulsive decision. She switches houses for the summer with an American woman. Soon, Ria finds herself in rural Connecticut, and the American enters Ria's busy Irish neighborhood. As the weeks...

Even Grade, a twenty-eight-year-old African-American man who grew up an orphan, and Valuable Korner, the teenage daughter of a promiscuous woman and an unknown father, meet through Even's lover Joody Two Sun, and embark on a quest for family, love, and commitment that takes them to places they never imagined they would go.

The author recounts her life story, including the ordeal she shared with her mother and five siblings through two decades, prisoners of the Moroccan monarchy from 1972 to 1991.