Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in African American

With her youthful appearance and light skin, African-American high school counselor Patricia knows how it feels to be an outsider in her own world. And when a biracial 15-year-old boy becomes the target of neighborhood bullies, she's determined to help him. One of New York's most successful men, Morgan Baxter feels totally at home in a corporate boardroom. But being a single father to a troubled teenager is a far more daunting challenge. Patricia Gilbert seems to understand his son - and him.

Born to a white mother and an African-American father, Dallas Oliver has always felt like an outsider. Life gets more complicated when her mother dies and she moves in with her father and stepmother. The one saving grace is Dallas' unexpected friendship with a white girl named Valerie Holland. Decades later, they're still best friends. Dallas is a journalist for a controversial magazine and Valerie is a single mother.

To the world, New York gallery owner Gayla Patton has it all: a fabulous career, a beautiful adolescent daughter, a devoted lover. But beneath the surface is a past she’d rather forget. Things start unraveling when David Kinney suddenly reappears in her life. Witness to a terrible crime, David was ten when he was brought into Gayla’s childhood home. Now, after serving time in prison for a crime he insists he didn’t commit, the controversial artist is stirring up dark memories... and awakening reluctant desires.

An artist trapped in an unfulfilling relationship, Leah Downey wants more out of life. But she plays it safe, never venturing too far from her comfort zone... not since the night she was mugged at knifepoint. Beginning a relationship with a perfect stranger is completely out of character for Leah. But something about Jason Horn strikes a chord deep within her. They couldn’t be more different. Jason is white, a streetwise New York cop haunted by his own demons.

A research manager at a TV station, Deanna Lindsay is content with her successful career and her relationship with her friend and lover, Richard. Then she gets the call that changes her life. Stacy Lowell is dead, the victim of an apparent hit and run. Deanna hasn't seen her old friend in almost seven years - so she's stunned to discover that the troubled woman appointed her as the guardian of her six-year-old biracial daughter.

Venice is high on April Stockwood’s list of romantic ports of call. Things get off to an ominous start when she arrives in Italy and a mishap leaves her with no place to stay. But her bad karma turns into a lucky break when she reconnects with Hayden Calloway. Now a diplomat with the American consulate, Hayden was April’s greatest crush when they attended high school together in Philadelphia.

Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington returns to his hometown of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania—just north of the Mason-Dixon Line—to learn more about the death of his father. Washington discovers that his father was researching a mystery of his own: why 13 escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all.

Flora is the dynamic leader of an environmental organization set to expose the corporate greed and political hypocrisy that has polluted so much of the Jamaica’s once-pristine coastal environment. Funding difficulties as well as personal crises loom as Flora attempts to take on the big business of the hotel industry despite threats to her life. Old friends and revelations from the past surface to reveal that all is not what it seems to be. A new lover tempts Flora to consider a life that she has pushed away for years, causing her to ask herself the fundamental questions: How does one change a life? How does one change a society?

Fourteen-year-old Audrey Martin, with her Poindexter glasses and her head humming the 3/4 meter of gospel music, knows she'll never get out of Kentucky - but when her fingers touch the piano keys, the whole church trembles. Her best friend, Caroline, daydreams about Hollywood stardom, but both girls feel destined to languish in a slow-moving stopover town in Montgomery County. That is, until chance intervenes and a booking agent offers Audrey a ticket to join the booming jazz scene in Harlem.

Philadelphia's South Street is a world of contradiction. The hardscrabble neighborhood is filled with prostitutes and gangsters; Working stiffs mingle with winos at Lightnin' Ed's bar. But the streetwalkers are nearing retirement, the gangsters are unemployed, and a community is thriving in and around a place written off by officials and politicians as blighted. Black poet Adlai Stevenson Brown makes his way to South Street in search of authenticity in the form of a neighborhood to save.

The award-winning author of Prosperos Daughter has written a novel more intimate than her usual big-picture work; this moving exploration of immigrant identity has a protagonist caught between race, class, and a mother's love.

Glorette Picard is dead. Her body was found in the alley behind a taqueria, half-hidden by wild tobacco trees, but no one—not Sidney, who knew she worked that alley, not her son Victor who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock out of dryers in the Launderland, not her uncle Enrique, who everyone knows will be the one to hunt down her killer—saw her die.

Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit

Written in an urban vernacular that’s electrifying and intimate, On the Come Up introduces a heroine whose voice is irrepressible, dynamic, and unstintingly honest. Thirteen-year-old AnnMarie Walker dreams of a world beyond Far Rockaway, where the sway of the neighborhood keeps her tied to old ideas about success. While attending a school for pregnant teens, AnnMarie comes across a flyer advertising movie auditions in Manhattan. Astonishingly, improbably, and four months before she’s due to give birth - she lands a lead role.

Despite being a straight-A student and voracious reader, eight-year old Sandrine Miller is treated as little more than a servant by her mother, who forces Sandrine to clean house, do chores and take care of her younger half-sister, Yolanda. On top of the despair of her life at home, Sandrine must confront growing up against the harshness of life in 1970s-era New Orleans, where men in cars follow her home from school and she is ostracized because she is a light-skinned black girl.

Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

A fictional recreation of the turbulence of the 1960s civil rights movement, narrated from alternating perspectives, chronicles the life and times of charismatic African-American leader John Calvin Marshall, from his rise to national prominence to his tragic assassination.

Celebrity actress Diamond Swain needs a peaceful place to hide out from the news-hungry paparazzi - a place like Whispering Pines. And yet from the moment she arrives at the remote Texas ranch, Diamond finds herself at odds with its rugged owner, Jake Madaris - a man who challenges her to care about more than making it to the top. Jake doesn't have time to babysit some Hollywood star. Then he comes face-to-face with beautiful, compassionate Diamond and is drawn into a whirlwind, secret romance. But is what he shares with her strong enough to overcome the media's prying eyes?

The upper-class inhabitants of the locked-gate community called Holroyd Square in Templeton, Texas, are used to their sedate, private lives - and the equally private secrets that each of them keeps hidden from the others. But when a vicious blackmailer rudely interrupts their existence, and then is found murdered in the Square, the police must be called, and only Assistant Chief Wash Shipp can uncover the killer and save their tattered reputations.

William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as property within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters, all of whom are slaves in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all.