"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.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction...

Three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willling to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriiff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love...

Alice and Willie Bynum, having moved from rural North Carolina to Georgetown in search of a better life for themselves and their children, must find a way to cope when their six-year-old daughter Clara drowns in the Potomac River.