Black History Month 2025

"The paths of three young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia unexpectedly--and dangerously--collide in this dramatic debut novel inspired by the explosive history of a city at war with itself. Philadelphia, 1837. When nineteen-year-old Charlotte escaped from the deteriorating White Oaks plantation four years ago, she'd expected freedom to look completely different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. Instead, she's locked away playing...

"Scarlett Wilcox is willing to live out her life as a spinster if it means being able to continue her medical research to help a friend in need. After all, few husbands would tolerate her dressing as a man to attend lectures at the Royal Academy of Science. If the Duke of Torrance finds her such a specimen, she'll agree to a marriage in name only, much to the dismay of her elder sister, the Viscountess. When she's unmasked at a lecture on ophthalmology,...

Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality. In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she's part of a family legacy of greatness. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and she's thrust into a movement for social change. Freda is reluctant to get involved, torn between a soon-to-be doctor her parents approve...

Toni Morrison - author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby - is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. Now, in her first work of fiction in six years, she gives us her most accomplished and spellbinding achievement. It is the story - set in post-Civil...

"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...