Bristol in 1787 is a booming city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, needs capital and a well-connected wife. Marriage to Frances Scott is mutually convenient. Frances finds her life dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, run, and slaves. Into her world comes Mehuru, once a priest in an ancient African kingdom, now a slave in England. Despite the difference in status and their roots from opposite...

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts turn to escape -and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

Natchez, Mississippi. 1843... At 34, Cornelius Carson is wealthy, and an important man in Natchez. He lives at Carefree, the grand estate he inherited, with his wife Euphonia, his small son, and his ward, a young Irish girl named May. A man of principle, he has freed all his slaves, and the former slaves live in the Dependency behind the big house at Carefree. But events are already in motion that will upend the lives of everyone at Carefree, none...

"Jenny is Free" -- Book Two of the "Spinning Jenny" series. "There's runaways all over the place in Cincinnati,and there's slave-catchers all over the place there, too. They'd come right in on a pretty young thing like you. And there's a slave-catcher right here on this boat..."Natchez 1841. Jenny has always yearned for freedom. But when her master Cornelius Carson abruptly sets her free and hands her a steamboat ticket to Cincinnati, free soil, she...

"Set in a small Nova Scotia town settled by former slaves, [the novel] depicts several generations of one family bound together and torn apart by blood, faith, time, and fate. Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family--Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner--whose lives unfold against the tumultuous events of the twentieth century from the Great Depression of the 1930s, through...

"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...