A sweeping picture of family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel’s wife dies, leaving him alone in a snooty North Carolina senior community. Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her family, takes in the white child whose father killed her beloved niece. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while his son guards the bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut about race relations, land use, history, and memory.

Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s novel Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories (Amistad 2022), is a moving and unforgettable collection of stories that span a lifetime.

Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency.

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood.

It’s 1966, and Bernice’s husband has either died or abandoned her. Her brother Floyd invites her to join him as a servant working for white owners of an old plantation house in Mississippi. Floyd warns Bernice about the housekeeper, Silva, who lives there with her two young sons. The owner and his wife don’t speak much and there seem to be secrets hidden in every corner.

A decrepit house in Greendale, Mississippi once belonged to Billie James’s father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when she was four years old. Her mother dies of cancer. Then years later, her paternal grandmother dies and leaves Billie the old Mississippi Delta house.

A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter.

In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut.

In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white.

Cora, who works at Harlem’s 135th Street library, reads a powerful poem by the young Langston Hughes, who begins to offer advice about her own writing. She’s awakened to thoughts about society and the role of women, prejudice, and the plight of Black women.

The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.

It’s 2015, and the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri are still simmering after the fatal police shooting sparked a national debate about use-of-force law, militarization of police, and the relationship between the police and African Americans.

Author and scholar David Wright Faladé tells the story of Richard Etheridge, who towards the end of the Civil War joined America’s first and only “African Brigade.”