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Publisher: Vintage International
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2006
ISBN-13: 9780307276643
ISBN-10: 0307276643
Call Number: AMADO

It surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes–a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

First Chapter  

The Curse of Caste by Julia C. Collins is not currently available at Houston Public Library, but you may request it through our free Interlibrary Loan service.  Select the "Check Library Catalog" link to search for this title in WorldCat; you will need your library card to access this database.
For further assistance with Interlibrary Loan, please call 832-393-1313.

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Publisher: Oxford University Press
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2006
ISBN-13: 9780195301595
ISBN-10: 0195301595
Call Number: N/A

Originally published in 1865 as a serialized novel in "The Christian Register" - the national newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Curse of Caste is set in antebellum Louisiana and Connecticut. It follows the lives of the beautiful mixed-race Claire Neville and her daughter as they search for fulfillment while dealing with slavery and prejudice during the nineteenth century.

Publisher: H. Holt
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1993
ISBN-13: 9780805027983
ISBN-10: 080502798X
Call Number: ERDRI

The members of the Chippewa Kaspaw and Lamartine families describe their simple existence as they both deny and discover their native heritages.This collection of interrelated stories of love, betrayal, mystery, and madness concerns men and woman bound by blood, legend, tradition, and need. The first book in Erdrich's Native American tetralogy Love Medicine is an authentic and emotionally powerful glimpse into the Native American experience - now resequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2004
ISBN-13: 9780399151606
ISBN-10: 0399151605
Call Number: GIBBO

In 1918, as rumors of peace spread across America, the country is confronted by the onslaught of a deadly influenza epidemic, while Maureen Ross struggles to deal with a difficult pregnancy, her emotionally abusive husband Troop, and despair, until the arrival of Troop's niece, Mary Oliver, the sheltered child of a wealthy, freethinking family who sets out to protect her aunt.

First Chapter  Large Print Edition  CD Audiobook  

Publisher: Vintage Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2000
ISBN-13: 9780375703973
ISBN-10: 0375703977
Call Number: KENAN

Kenan's daring and innovative first novel weaves a vivid and horrific tale through the generations of a black Southern family. Sixteen-year-old Horace Cross is plagued by issues that hover in his impressionable spirit and take shape in his mind as loathsome demons, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. In the face of Horace's fate, his cousin Reverend James "Jimmy" Green questions the values of a community that nourishes a boy, places their hopes for salvation on him, only to deny him his destiny. Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.

Table of Contents  

Publisher: Penguin Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2003
ISBN-13: 9780142001745
ISBN-10: 0142001740
Call Number: KIDD

After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens, whose life has been defined by the tragic death of her mother, joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters who show them the true meaning of love and family.

First Chapter  CD Audiobook  Downloadable Audiobook  Film Adaptation on DVD  

Chinese Language Translation  German Language Translation  Spanish Language Translation  

Editor's Pick

This thoroughly enjoyable second novel by James McBride is a thrilling story of runaway slave Liz Spocott, who - after a terrible head injury, gains the ability to see the future of her race.  The characters in this novel are richly developed and the language is lyrical, yet the fast-paced plot keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I highly recommend it!

~ Sarah Borders, editor

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Publisher: Riverhead Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 2008
ISBN-13: 9781594489723
ISBN-10: 1594489726
Call Number: MCBRI

A tale set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the nineteenth-century Chesapeake Bay region finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief who vengefully calls slave catcher Denwood Long out of retirement.

Large Print Edition  CD Audiobook  

Publisher: Knopf
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1977
ISBN-13: 9780394497846
ISBN-10: 0394497848
Call Number: MORRI

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a novel of large beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world we enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman), son of the richest black family in a mid-western town. We see Milkman growing up in his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother, and we follow him as he strikes out alone. This is a novel that expresses, with passion, tenderness, and a magnificence of language, the mysterious primal essence of family bond and conflict, the feelings and experience of all people wanting, and striving, to be alive.

First Chapter  Spanish Language Translation  

Publisher: Vintage Books
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1989
ISBN-13: 9780679721819
ISBN-10: 0679721819
Call Number: NAYLO

On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense.

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Check Library Catalog Pub Date: 1992
ISBN-13: 9780151191543
ISBN-10: 0151191549
Call Number: WALKE

Sisters Nettie and Celie are separated from one another as young girls, Celie to become the child bride and wife to a widower, and Nettie to be taken by a black family to Africa as a missionary. Celie's marriage is a harsh and poverty-stricken arrangement, and she is sustained only by a series of trusting letters she addresses to God and to her sister. But eventually even this unhappy marriage proves to be a blessing, as it introduces Celie to a woman with whom she can find love and security. When Nattie returns after a 30-year absence, the sisters' bond is once more made whole in a magical and moving climax.

Film Adaptation on DVD  Vietnamese Language Translation