Tayari Jones
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
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Description
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.9 - AR Pts: 13
Formats
Description
A story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families, the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered....
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 12
Formats
Description
Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt — real and imagined. At twenty-five, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her. With
...Author
Description
A NEW YORK TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
A 2018 BEST OF THE YEAR SELECTION OF NPR * TIME * BUSTLE * O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * AMAZON.COM
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB 2018 SELECTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
"A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple." -Barack Obama
"Haunting . . . Beautifully written." -The New York...
5) Atlanta Noir
Author
Description
Atlanta itself is a crime scene. After all, Georgia was founded as a de facto penal colony and in 1864, Sherman burned the city to the ground. We might argue about whether the arson was the crime or the response to the crime, but this is indisputable: Atlanta is a city sewn from the ashes and everything that grows here is at once fertilized and corrupted by the past . . . These stories do not necessarily conform to the traditional expectations of...
Author
Description
Award-winning novelist Tayari Jones delivers a story based on the 1979-1980 Atlanta child murders. Told from the perspective of three fifth-grade classmates, Leaving Atlanta is a vividly disturbing, but hopeful novel. The convincing characters, voiced by a full cast of narrators, make this a haunting and effective work.
7) The street
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.2 - AR Pts: 19
Description
"The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies"--|cProvided by publisher.
Author
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Formats
Description
"In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston--the sole black student at the college--was living in New York, "desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world." During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American...