A New York Times Notable Book: In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
"A stunner." —Flea, musician and actor, TheWall Street Journal

Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren's father, a preacher, and...

Recent immigrants from China and desperate for work and money, ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents take a job managing a rundown motel in Southern California, even though the owner, Mr. Yao is a nasty skinflint who exploits them; while her mother (who was an engineer in China) does the cleaning, Mia works the front desk and tries to cope with demanding customers and other recent immigrants--not to mention being only one of two Chinese in her fifth grade...

A wonderful new novel from one of America's bestselling authors. Exploring the tensions between a local culture and a changing national political agenda; family arguments and love: an instant classic. Twenty years after the trial of Tom Robinson, Scout returns home to Maycomb to visit her father and struggles with personal and political issues as her small Alabama town adjusts to the turbulent events beginning to transform the United States in the...

A young girl growing up in an Alabama town in the 1930s learns of injustice and violence when her father, a widowed lawyer, defends a black man falsely accused of rape.

"Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...

A holiday collection of short fiction shares vignettes that capture the eccentric lives of the inhabitants of a small Southern town, from an efficiency expert who gets Christmas down to forty-five minutes flat, to a woman who claims John James Audubon is living in her attic.

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...

More than a decade ago, Mira fled her segregated hometown of Kipsen, leaving behind her best friend, the white Celine, and Woodsman Plantation - rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves. Now, Mira is back in Kipsen for Celine's wedding weekend at that same plantation. Mira hopes to reconnect with her old friends, especially Jesse, the boy she secretly loved. Woodsman remains a monument to its racist history and the darkest elements of the plantation's...

"Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, [Rick Bragg] explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoon bread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of...

"For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother's considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother's demise, followed by a cryptic...