Set on an 18th-century Jamaican sugar plantation, the novel follows Lilith, a young woman born into slavery, as she navigates the violent limits imposed on her body and choices.

Set in the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, during the 1920s and 1930s, the novel follows the intersecting lives of Black and Jewish residents centered around a neighborhood grocery.

An anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole embedded in the South Vietnamese army, recounts life after the fall of Saigon while living among a South Vietnamese exile community in the United States.

A contemporary Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century, where she encounters ancestors and must navigate slavery's social and moral realities to survive and return to her own time.

A formally experimental novel that focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s grief after the death of his young son and locates most of the action in the bardo — an in-between realm between life and rebirth.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood, following life in the segregated American South and his later move to Chicago where he begins a writing career and political engagement.

Set in the U.S. before the Civil War, the novel follows African American characters whose private relationships and household lives intersect with the broader realities of slavery and escape.

Set against the realities of a mid-20th-century reform school in the American South, the novel follows young boys who confront daily physical and moral violence inside a state institution.

Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel tracks interconnected lives in a county shaped by slavery and unexpected ownership dynamics, including Black Americans who themselves become slaveholders.

A contemporary novel shaped like a folktale in which a young woman and those around her navigate consequences after a theft and encounters with trickster spirits. The setup focuses on moral complications inside domestic relationships and the social effects of magic on everyday life.

Set after the American Civil War, the novel focuses on a formerly enslaved woman who lives in Cincinnati and must confront a violent past that continues to intrude on daily life.

A thirty-something woman travels to her deceased grandmother’s rural home to clear it out and discovers a relative’s writings and a second, unsettling manuscript that record obsessions with a forbidding local book.