Helen Plum Library

Meet Mare, a grandmother with flair and a fascinating past.Octavia and Tali are dreading the road trip their parents are forcing them to take with their grandmother over the summer. After all, Mare isn't your typical grandmother. She drives a red sports car, wears stiletto shoes, flippy wigs, and push-up bras, and insists that she's too young to be called Grandma. But somewhere on the road, Octavia and Tali discover there's more to Mare than what...

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2015 BY THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, MEN'S JOURNAL, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, KANSAS CITY STAR, BROOKLYN MAGAZINE, NPR, HUFFINGTON POST, THE DAILY BEAST, AND BUZZFEED

WINNER OF THE 2015 ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD FOR LITERARY EXCELLENCE

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2016 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION

NATIONAL

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Fresh betrayal leads to consequences no one saw coming in this book from New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby.
It's been four years since twenty-eight-year old Alicia Black, daughter of Reverend Curtis Black, divorced her second husband, the most womanizing and corrupt man she has ever known.
Since then, Alicia has been dating her first husband, Phillip Sullivan, a wonderfully kind and true man of God...

"A pure delight from start to finish!"—Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye

Acclaimed author Trisha R. Thomas delivers a masterful new tale of scandal and intuition. In 1950s oil-rich Oklahoma, Bailey Dowery, a dressmaker with the gift of "second sight," reluctantly reveals the true loves and intentions of her socialite clients, making her a silent witness to a shocking crime.

1954:

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REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “[A] richly textured and deeply moving debut” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) about one unforgettable Southern Black family and its youngest daughter’s coming of age in the 1990s.
“A triumph . . . Redwood Court is storytelling at its best: tender, vivid, and richly complicated.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times...

Knowing a missing despised man to be innocent of the murder charge levied against him, used bookstore owner Paris Minton hires former sheriff Jefferson T. Hill to investigate, but when the sheriff goes missing as well, Minton enlists Fearless Jones for the case. 150,000 first printing.

Dodgers is a dark, unforgettable coming-of-age journey that recalls the very best of Richard Price, Denis Johnson, and J.D. Salinger.
It is the story of a young LA gang member named East, who is sent by his uncle along with some other teenage boys—including East's hothead younger brother—to kill a key witness hiding out in Wisconsin. The journey takes East out of a city he's never left and into an America that...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER•  A superbly crafted novel, Family Tree asks penetrating questions about family and the choices people make in times of crisis.
“Family Tree is warm, rich, textured, and impossible to put down.”
—Nora Roberts
For as long as she can remember, Dana Clarke has longed for the stability of home and family. Now she has married a man she adores, whose heritage...