Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in African American

Born a slave, Bledsoe had never left Our Joy plantation, and a daring escape offers his only chance for liberty. On the run he encounters Alice, an Irish indentured servant, committing what appears to be an act of murder as she burns down a shack in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. Faced with the threat of capture, Bledsoe and Alice become reluctant allies. An epic tale unfolds as their quest for freedom pulls them from swamp to city, from North Carolina to Virginia.

Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his 10th birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals.

Paris, 1944: the city steams in the summer heat, bristling with anticipation of its impending liberation. It marks the beginning of the end of a devastating war… and the beginning of a year like no other for Marie-Therese Brillard and her children, Colette and Christophe. They first came to Paris from Martinique in 1928, among the immigrants of color who flocked to France in the 1920s and 30s. They settled in Montmartre, a vibrant neighborhood teeming with musicians, writers, and artists, and began the arduous task of building a new life in a new land.

International hit man Gideon never misses his target, but when a job in Detroit goes bad, he should have killed his client - a cold-blooded woman who hired him to kill her husband - when he had the chance. Now the city's mayor and with money and power to spare, this woman will stop at nothing to see that Gideon gets what he deserves.

Betty Jewel Hughes was once the hottest black jazz singer in Memphis. But when she finds herself pregnant and alone, she gives up her dream of being a star to raise her beautiful daughter, Billie, in Shakerag, Mississippi. Now, ten years later, in 1955, Betty Jewel is dying of cancer and looking for someone to care for Billie when she’s gone. With no one she can count on, Betty Jewel does the unthinkable: she takes out a want ad seeking a loving mother for her daughter.

Margaret and Charles Lewin adopted Isaiah as a newborn - giving the boy all the love a child could want, and everything money can buy. But can even the most loving, caring white family be responsible for raising a black child? Selma Richards, the boy's mother, is now off drugs, learning to read, and has a responsible job. She's not rich and doesn't live in the best neighborhood, but she's healed herself. And now she wants her son back.

Four women. Two years.A friendship to last a lifetime.The only things that Sharita, Thursday, Risa, and Tammy have in common are their disastrous love lives. But the year three of them turn 30 will be different, they swear!Sharita, a plump and conservative accountant wants to make partner at her firm and find the man of her dreams. Thursday, the daughter of a formerly chart-topping political rapper, wants to stop being a serial one-month stander, and settle down into a stable life with a stable boyfriend.

Celeste English and Ronnie Frazier are sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Celeste is a doctor's wife, living a perfect and elegant façade. But secretly, her marriage is falling apart and her need to control people around her threatens to destroy them all. Ronnie is an actress, living in New York. But she has no money, she has no home, and her life is held together by "chewing gum, paper clips, and spit." When their father dies, the sisters inherit a house in Prosper, North Carolina.

Dmytryk Knight was a respectable man who had followed the blueprints for the American Dream: go to college, find the girl of your dreams, get married, buy a house on the affluent side of Detroit. He’d done it all by the book. But when a crippling recession annihilates the auto industry, Dmytryk and his wife, Cora, suddenly find themselves without jobs and in foreclosure. And after two years of taking any job they can find and trying to live honestly, they realize that integrity just doesn’t pay the bills.

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street - a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center. As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice.

Venus McGee, Draya Carter, and Jackie Benson are coworkers with a lot in common. They’re smart, independent, driven, and deserving of recognition - certainly more than they’ve been handed by a demoralizing boss. He’s the topic of conversation at their impromptu get-together after the company holiday party, where the threesome fantasizes about a life without him. There has to be an alternative to taking a deep breath and sucking it up. There is. It’s just not the one they expected. When morning comes, Venus, Draya, and Jackie are blindsided by murder....

Northern-educated physician Kenneth Harper moves back to his hometown in Georgia with a relatively modest goal: he wants to start his own medical practice. He hopes that racist prejudices have relaxed enough to allow room for someone like him, but the local presence of the Ku Klux Klan offers some sense of how little the community has actually changed. In response to that reality, Harper seeks to liberate local sharecroppers from white landowners via a cooperative society - but that’s something the area’s ruling class simply cannot abide.

A northern white couple has relocated to the South to operate a vineyard on a North Carolina plantation. There, they pass their idle hours listening to the stories of one Uncle Julius, who has a deep knowledge of the land. These stories, however, are more than mere entertainments. They all have their time and place, and they offer not only a quiet commentary on the events of the day but also a deeper reckoning with the plantation’s disturbing past.

Defiant, eloquent, and thoroughly modern, Claude McKay’s early collection of celebrated poems is widely recognized as having helped to spark the Harlem Renaissance. In Harlem Shadows, McKay gives precise and poignant expression to the injustices of white oppression in many forms. He also paints a vivid picture of Harlem at the dawn of its rebirth and shows the tremendous vitality of the neighborhood as well as the many threats it faced.

Drawing on the 1898 overthrow of the Wilmington, North Carolina, government by white supremacists, Charles W. Chesnutt’s classic novel unmasked the racism of the post-Reconstruction South.

Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave begin their lives as childhood friends, but that friendship is not bound to last. Belton (modeled on Booker T. Washington) is an African American integrationist; Bernard (modeled on W. E. B. Du Bois) is a biracial militant, and their lives, like their politics, quickly diverge. When they do meet again, at a Black nationalist community called “the Imperium,” the stakes could not be higher.

In this fictional confession, an unnamed narrator reveals the “great secret” of his life: he was born mixed race - and his ability to pass as white has provided him a unique perspective on America’s profound racial prejudice. As he recounts his experiences in the American South, the suburbs of the Northeast, New York City jazz clubs, and various European capitals, he also grapples with the emotional fallout of a life lived in constant fear of discovery - a life lived, in other words, in a culture unaccountably preoccupied with the shade of a person’s skin.

Lina Henry is a wife and mother who likens herself to a pretty paper doll. She lives in a beautiful home in the Atlanta suburbs. Her husband, David, is a well-to-do investment banker. She’s raised two wonderful teenagers. To the outside world, the Henry family is perfect. What no one knows is that Lina’s paper doll life is being torn apart in a controlling and abusive marriage. Then Lina develops an unexpected friendship with another man, and reconnects with her former best friend. But as David senses his loss of control, he becomes more dangerous.

A Cadillac, a pistol, and a corpse make for another morning in Chicago. The body belongs to Walter Griffin, a prominent Black Chicagoan insider hailing from the city’s West Side. He ascended to the upper echelons of the mayor’s office only to meet his end in a watery grave at Wolf Point. Forensics finds his prints on the gun; it’s ruled a suicide. But grizzled private investigator Ashe Cayne knows better. Griffin’s children plead with a reluctant Ashe to hunt their father’s killer.

When the Butler sisters learn they’ve inherited their beloved grandma Betty’s beach house in South Carolina, they have mixed emotions. To put it mildly. Successful Lana seems to have it all. Nobody needs to know that her marriage and finances are falling apart. For her there’s no other option but to sell the beach house. Overburdened Yvonne already has priorities—including being her mother’s sole caretaker. Her advice: put it on the market and move on. Then there’s sentimental Tami. She can’t let her sisters just unload their past without at least one last trip to the Sea Islands.