A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"The son of a Mississippi policeman finds a boy living in hiding in the wilderness and tries to help him without giving away his secret"-- When his Mississippi policeman gives Sam a fishing boat, he uses the boat to disappear for hours at time. Exploring the swampy surroundings of his bayou home, Sam finds a boy living on his own in the wilderness. Davey gives evasive explanation as to why he's on his own, and Sam makes efforts to help him. But this...

"From Percival Everett -- a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards -- comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide...

Documents the 1955 kidnapping and murder of teenage Emmett Till as remembered by his cousin, sharing descriptions of life in period Mississippi and how the ensuing murder trial became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Ray Atlee, a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, is forty-three and newly single. His father, a very sick old man who lives the life of a recluse in the ancestral home in Clanton, Mississippi, was once a beloved and powerful official who towered over local law and politics for many years. With the end in sight, Judge Atlee issues a summons to Ray to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of the family estate. Ray reluctantly heads...

"There's nothing Athena College librarian Charlie Harris likes better than curling up with a good book -- except maybe curling up with his Maine Coon cat, Diesel. But when the library's abrasive new director is put out of circulation, both Charlie and Diesel will have to clear a friend when the evidence is stacked against her ..."--

This novel of female power and vulnerability, race, and class explores the unlikely friendship between a precocious black girl and a mysterious white woman in a small Mississippi town in the early 1980s.