Robin Miles
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"One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched--asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who...
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""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...
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"Best friends since the first day of classes at The College of Charleston, Ashley Anne Waters and Mary Beth Smythe, now 23 years old, live in Ashley's parents' beach house rent-free. Ashley is a gallery assistant who aspires to become an artist. Mary Beth, a gifted cook from Tennessee, works for a caterer while searching for a good teaching job. Though they both know what they want out of life, their parents barely support their dreams and worry for...
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Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...
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"Leslie Anne Greene Carter is the last original wife among her husband's group of cronies. They've all traded in for younger... blonder... more enhanced models. But she is proud of her status and the longevity of her marriage. Sure the spark isn't quite there the way it once was. And it would be nicer if her husband paid a bit more attention to her desires but there's something to be said for a comfortable relationship. Or at least she thinks so until...
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When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's...
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When Lisa's favorite patient Kathy loses her battle with cancer, she finds herself drawing closer to Carrie and Suzanne, Kathy's devoted friends. As their lives connect and they powerwalk the beaches of the Isle of Palms, they uncover the truth of Kathy's life-- and discover their own futures in the process.
In this charming, evocative, soul-touching novel, Dorothea Benton Frank once again takes us deep into the heart of the magical Lowcountry where...
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The Vanderbeekers have always lived in the brownstone on 141st Street. It's practically another member of the family. So when their reclusive, curmudgeonly landlord decides not to renew their lease, the five siblings have eleven days to do whatever it takes to stay in their beloved home and convince the dreaded Beiderman just how wonderful they are. And all is fair in love and war when it comes to keeping their home. A modern classic in the making...
11) Porch lights
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When Jimmy McMullen, a fireman with the NYFD, is killed in the line of duty, his wife, Jackie, and ten-year-old son, Charlie, are devastated. Charlie idolized his dad, and now the outgoing, curious boy has become quiet and reserved. Trusting in the healing power of family, Jackie decides to return to her childhood home on Sullivans Island. Crossing the bridge from the mainland, Jackie and Charlie enter a world full of wonder and magic--lush green...
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Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Brown was promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. Instead she finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil's Half-Acre, a jail where slaves are broken, tortured, and sold every day. Forced to become the mistress of the brutal man who owns the jail, Pheby's survival lies in outwitting him-- even if it means making the ultimate sacrifice. -- adapted from back cover...
13) Counting by 7s
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Twelve-year-old genius and outsider Willow Chance must figure out how to connect with other people and find a surrogate family for herself after her parents are killed in a car accident.
14) The dew breaker
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We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”—or torturer—s...
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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
A National Book Award Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book
From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her “second father,” when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents
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Claire Limyé Lanmé -- Claire of the Sea Light -- is an enchanting child born into love and tragedy in Ville Rose, Haiti. Claire's mother died in childbirth, and on each of her birthdays Claire is taken by her father, Nozias, to visit her mother's grave. Nozias wonders if he should give away his young daughter to a local shopkeeper, who lost a child of her own, so that Claire can have a better life. But on the night of Claire's seventh birthday,...
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Newly graduated from college and an aspiring writer, Beth Hayes craves independence and has a world to conquer. But her notions of travel, graduate study, and writing the great American novel will have to be postponed--with her mother leaving to fulfill her own dreams in Paris and her Aunt Maggie, Uncle Grant, and stepfather Simon moving to California, Beth is elected by her elders to house-sit the Island Gamble. Buoyed by sentimental memories of...
18) Africaville
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"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 the social protests of the 1960s to the economic upheavals in the 1980s. A century earlier, Kath Ella's ancestors established a new home in Nova Scotia. Like her ancestors,...
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Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway and one of them is killed. The survivor is left to pick up the pieces of not only her own life but the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman left behind. As these three lives intersect, Pictures of You asks how well we really know the people we love, and how do we forgive the unforgivable? Riveting, hopeful, and unsettling, it is an exploration of...