"Nella Larsen's second novel, Passing, first published in 1929, is a fascinating exploration of race and identity set amidst the blossoming Harlem Renaissance. Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for...

The daughter of an African mother she never knew and a white sailor, Zarit - known as Tt - was born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue. Growing up amid brutality and fear, Tt found solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and the mysteries of voodoo. Her life changes when twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, Saint Lazare. Overwhelmed by the challenges of his responsibilities...

"A woman wondering who she really is goes in search of a father she never knew--only to find something far more complicated than she ever expected--in this "stirring narrative about family, our capacity to change and the need to belong" (Time). Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. In her 40s, she has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother--the only parent who raised her--is...

"In Chinatown to deliver a baby, Shara Brandt meets a group of women she might otherwise never have come across: Irish girls who, after alighting on Ellis Island alone, have married Chinese men in the same predicament. But faced with bigotry in New York from every side, their mixed-race children are often treated badly, by the Irish, the Chinese--even the police ..."--Page 4 of cover.

"Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura's prearranged marriage to the son of her father's business associate would secure her family's status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man--an American sailor, a gaijin--and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it's learned Naoko carries the sailor's child, she's cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences...

"She just witnessed her uncle's murder, she's running for her life, and now Dr. Katelyn Lyda is face-to-face with a man who could be her salvation. It's too bad Sebastian Caine is one of the bad guys ... skilled at separating prized possessions from their owners. Sebastian is after an ancient relic. But he reconsiders the job when he finds himself staring at the wrong end of a gun. The lady with her finger on the trigger seems to have everything he...

"Classic and true story of Vyry; the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction." -- Back cover.

Introducing a new star of her generation, an electric debut story collection about mixed-race and African-American teenagers, women, and men struggling to find a place in their families and communities.
When Danielle Evans's short story "Virgins" was published in The Paris Review in late 2007, it announced the arrival of a major new American short story writer. Written when she was only twenty-three, Evans's story...

Faith Kenner is pursuing her dream to become a doctor at Willamette University's medical college so she can use her gift for healing to help those in need, especially the native populations forced onto reservations and then neglected. When she meets Andrew Gratton, a handsome riverboat captain who has been injured on his ship, she uses her skills to tend his wound, and a friendship grows between them. Andrew admires her strength and willingness to...

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man. Light in August is the story of Lena Grove's search for the father of her unborn child, and features one of Faulkner's most memorable characters: Joe Christmas, a desperate drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.