Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in African American

After solving a crime blamed on Vodou in New Orleans’s French Quarter, Vodou priestess turned amateur detective Reina Dumond has returned to her benevolent work as a healer. But when her friend and enigmatic client Evangeline “Vangie” Stiles comes to her for a spell, Mambo Reina quickly realizes what Vangie really needs is a sleuth.

Devon and James Payne are brothers and rivals since childhood. But they share an affinity for sports that brings glory to their Connecticut town and promise for the future. Then they’re in a car accident. Devon is paralyzed for life, while James goes on to live the dream. For the Paynes, the tremulous repercussions of that evening never settled. Over the course of a decade, Devon decides to visit his seven siblings now scattered across the globe.

In cosmopolitan Johannesburg, three high-flying couples form the core of the elite Khula Society: part investment group, part social club, with meetings where the champagne flows, the dresses are designer and the one-upmanship is off the scale. Noma, Moshidi, Lerato and their husbands are living the dream—or so it appears from the outside. In reality, the cut and thrust of ‘keeping up with the Khulas’ is taking its toll on all three couples.

After Charlotte Bowman hooks up with hot Irish footballer Eoghan O’Farrell, she doesn’t expect to see him again. For one thing, she’s too busy for romance. She’s got her designer shoe company, a globe-trotting best friend to keep up with, and a frenetic lifestyle in New York City. But when an elite Irish soccer team reaches out to Charlotte about designing a shoe for its star player, she can’t believe it. Could her random hookup be the celebrity footballer with a penchant for new cleats?

When tragedy strikes Marjette’s street, and an unexpected child shows up on the first day of school with an uncle who has all the class moms aflutter, Marjette is forced to contend with both her neighbor and her own heartache over losing the life she once thought was guaranteed.

Nona “Peaches” Davenport, abandoned by the man she loved and betrayed by family, left her Natchez, Mississippi, home fifteen years ago and never looked back. She’s forged a promising future in Chicago as a professor of African American Studies. Nona even finds her once-closed heart persuaded by a new love. But that’s all shaken when her father’s death forces her to return to everything she’s tried to forget.

One of the best-known poets of the Revolutionary War era, Phillis Wheatley made history with this collection, which was the first such work to be published from an African American woman. Celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, Wheatley found admirers in the likes of Voltaire, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Paul Jones.

A thousand years in the future, a Black elite class reigns. The lower classes toil in the fields or scrape by in blighted cities, serving their rulers in a cruel, divided world. Among the Elites is eighteen-year-old Avi Jore, born to a powerful father and destined to rule. But as she comes of age, Avi cannot help but notice the injustices in her world - the treatment of enslaved workers, the oppression of the lower classes. Her disillusionment grows when she meets Saige Wilde, a mixed-race enslaved girl whose only goal is escaping beyond the borders of their brutal nation.

Countee Cullen was already a prominent literary figure when he published Color, his auspicious debut collection of poetry. In deceptively simple verse, and in harmony with lyric tradition rather than rebellion against it, Cullen covered such complex terrain as race, faith, mortality, sexuality, and identity. Cullen may be less well known today than his contemporaries, but his emotional candor, creative ambition, and impudent humor retain an unforgettable spark.

For Jasmine Ware, curating books for an exclusive clientele is her passion. Until an old friend, a dealer of rare books, goes missing and his partner is murdered. Linked to an artifact smuggled out of the ancient library at Timbuktu, the mystery draws Jasmine deeper into a plot that could cost her her life.

When The Sport of the Gods opens, the Hamilton family is doing relatively well. They have stable jobs and good reputations as servants for a wealthy Southern family - but they also have little sense of how tenuous their existence has become. When money goes missing, the supposed victim points a finger at patriarch Berry Hamilton, and Berry is sentenced to ten years of hard labor. In response, Berry’s wife, Fannie, and his two children, Joe and Kit, migrate to New York City. Their hope is that the great city of the North will provide them with a fresh start.

Alisha Blake works her magic in the kitchen, creating delectable desserts for her grandfather’s restaurant in rural Illinois. Though Alisha relishes the close relationship she has with her family, she can’t help but dream about opening a cookie shop in Chicago. She may be a small-town baker, but Alisha has big ambitions. Then a dinosaur bone turns up in her grandparents’ backyard. When paleontologist Quentin Harris arrives to see the discovery for himself, he’s hoping that the fossil will distract him from a recent painful breakup. Instead, he finds Alisha - and sparks fly.

At the heart of Harriet E. Wilson’s autobiographical novel is Frado, the young daughter of a mixed-race couple, who is exploited first by a middle-class New England white family and then by an opportunistic husband on the abolitionist lecture circuit. In adopting the nineteenth-century conventions of both the sentimental novel and the narratives of enslaved people, Wilson delivered a scathing and ironic indictment of the racism of the antebellum North.

Entering Harvard by passing as white, medical student Reuel Briggs is considered a genius in the unconventional science of the occult. Though ignorant of his own very relevant lineage, Reuel finds himself on a lucrative archaeological expedition to Ethiopia. There, he hopes to raid the treasures of Meroe. Instead, traversing the ruins of a hidden city and beset by maddening visions and escalating dangers, he is forced to confront his own bloodline. What Reuel unearths is beyond anything he imagined.

Believing fiction to be an invaluable tool for social change, Pauline E. Hopkins used her first novel to challenge the racist and sexist assumptions of her time. Contending Forces operates on an epic scale - with settings ranging from antebellum North Carolina to post-Civil War Boston - and Hopkins surveys this panorama with an eye in particular on the intersections of race, class, and gender relations.

Iola Leroy is a woman who contains multitudes. Born the light-skinned child of a Mississippi slaveholder, Iola is raised in the belief that she is white - and learns the truth only after her father dies. Iola is then sold into bondage and begins to question certain other lessons of her youth as well. In the midst of widespread discrimination and violence, Iola continually strives to liberate herself from all the forces that would oppress her and is eventually able to embrace her true heritage.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, siblings Rena and John Walden seek a better life for themselves by passing as white in their new home state of South Carolina. John’s success as an attorney and marriage to a white Southerner help cement his own place, but Rena’s engagement to John’s best friend brings a new level of scrutiny that threatens to expose them both. As the rewards increase, so does the risk, and ultimately, the color line seems determined to re-exert itself.

In 1850 in Massachusetts, Whittaker House stood as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It’s where two freedom seekers, Little Annie and Clementine, hid and perished. Whittaker House still stands, and Little Annie and Clementine still linger, their dreams of freedom unfulfilled. Now a fashionably distressed vacation rental in the Berkshires, Whittaker House draws seekers of another kind: Black women who only appear to be free.

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.

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.