African American Sagas

It has been a year since Jillian Novak ended their affair - a year that left Dr. Aidan Westmoreland determined to win back his lover. He knows they shouldn't have to keep their relationship a secret, and he'll follow her around the world to prove it. Fourteen days on a cruise ship - just Aidan, Jillian, and the deep blue sea - and a passion that won't be denied.

Just when it appears that all her hard work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is about to pay off with a White House job, 35-year-old Ida B. Wells Dunbar finds herself on Washington, DC’s post-election sidelines even as her 20something counterparts overrun the West Wing. Adding to her woes, her father, the Reverend Horace A. Dunbar, Atlanta civil rights icon, is notoriously featured on an endlessly replayed YouTube clip in which his pronouncements don’t exactly jibe with the new era in American politics.

In the years following the Civil War, Mariah Reddick, former slave to Carrie McGavock - the "Widow of the South" - has quietly built a new life for herself as a midwife to the women of Franklin, Tennessee. But when her ambitious, politically minded grown son, Theopolis, is murdered, Mariah - no stranger to loss - finds her world once more breaking apart. How could this happen? Who wanted him dead?

Still a Mistress explores the gritty world of good girls gone bad, lured by money and men. A year after the tragic death of her family, Oshyn is still trying to piece together what’s left of her life. While struggling to return to a drama-free world, she is optimistic about her future. Little does she know that her cousin, Chloe, has reappeared to finish what she started: a vindictive cycle of mayhem.

When G Double D, the founder of the gangsta rap label Explicit Content, seduces her singing partner, Leila "Fatal Beauty" Aponte, into splitting up their act to pursue solo stardom, Cassie Rivers is driven to find her own path to success, but her competitive nature could lead to danger when she uncovers dark secrets about G and his Explicit Content company.

The Wedding tells the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast's black bourgeoisie.

Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society", we witness the prominent Coles family as they gather for the wedding of their loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole area of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York.

This spirited tale of love, family, and honoring loved ones is filled with sharp insights. As four sisters prepare for their father's funeral, they examine what he meant to them. But they are all thrown off balance when they discover the secret their father carried to his grave.

Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary - kept from 1711 until 1758 - reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution.

Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day - and she hasn't been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns, but her father's home is unnervingly secluded. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died.

Fourteen years after the end of slavery, Lord Henry Hardin and his wife, Lady Bertha, enjoy an entitled life in Union County, Arkansas. Until he faces a devastating reality: Bertha is unable to bear children. If Henry doesn't produce an heir, the American branch of his family name will die out. So Henry, desperate to preserve his aristocratic family lineage, does the unthinkable.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

When the "perfect man" is the "wrong man", heartbreak is inevitable! This little story is a powerful story about a young woman who falls in love when she should’ve been standing in love. Leah Daniels meets the perfect man, when she literally runs into Nate (Nathan Moore) on her first day at work. She is swept away and is beyond help. Sadly, Nate knows that Leah is weak for him. He takes advantage of his effect on her, as she allows him to drift in and out of her life. Nate is the type of man that knows how to carry himself, with an incredibly high confidence level. He is totally ...

Some might say that Khalil Patterson is living his best life. Kendrick Nance and Jack Dandridge are both dead, and he is now the boss. But he still has what’s left of Kojo's operation, which is being run by Shanice Hardaway, to worry about. Now that he is running things, it’s time to turn his attention and firepower to shutting her down and taking over her market.

What happens when a young girl is abruptly taken away from everyone and everything she knows? When the comforts of a Bayou home are pulled from under the feet of young Rahab Auguste, she must rise above and face the challenges on the streets of the South Bronx. Discovering family secrets withheld from her, Rahab embarks on a journey down a path she never saw coming, with a mother she never knew.

Blackboard and Essence best-selling author Francis Ray has been honored with the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, as well as the EMMA and Golden Pen Awards. Here, she continues the saga of the Grayson family with Morgan's story. Mother Ruth Grayson is pushing her son to get married, but he resists - until he meets Phoenix, a beautiful artist with a secret.

The bling is brighter, the drama is amped up, and the delicious beauties from Tu-Shonda L. Whitaker’s Millionaire Wives Club are back for a second season of backstabbing, divorce parties, and family sagas. Lights, camera, action! Milan, Jaise, and Chaunci are the gorgeous, high-rolling divas starring in the hit reality show Millionaire Wives Club. As they struggle with love, lies, lust, and the pressures of sudden fame, their friendships turn into catfights that keep the cameras following all their malicious moves.

The anticipated second installment of In These Streets: Koi’s Saga is here. It picks up where the first installment has left off, informing you of the events after young Koi and older boyfriend Griff were rushed to the hospital. This second installment is just as hot as the first, introducing you to a new cast of characters with even more secrets and scandals. Find out what happens when their paths collide as the saga continues.

Everything from life, love, infidelity, murder and death are explored as seen through the eyes of Eliza Ma'Koi MacDougal. A young feisty teen who was forced to grow up fast due to the death of the first man who ever loved her. Yes, her dad. She then watches as her mother spirals out of control as she chases her crack demons. Forced to grow up fast and take reins of the household and younger siblings to try and keep them out the foster care system, she meets and falls in love with a 19-year- old male named Griffin.

On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife, Angeline, are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear jazz and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the swirling, heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts jazz dynamite from his horn.

Timbuktu, western Africa, 1706. Folashade, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a professor of linguistics, is sent south with her older sisters, Bibi and Adaeze, to endure the painful ceremony that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is expected to. In Djenné, on the banks of the Niger, the sisters’ fate and that of their fellow Bambara are changed forever when they’re kidnapped, marched toward grueling indignities on Gorée Island, and eventually hauled aboard an English slaver bound for the Americas.