Recommendations based on "Beloved Special Archival Edition"

An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from Caleb Azumah Nelson, the no.1 bestselling, award-winning author of Open WaterThe one thing that can solve Stephen's problems is dancing. Dancing at Church, with his parents and brother, the shimmer of Black hands raised in praise; he might have lost his faith, but he does believe in rhythm. Dancing with his friends, somewhere in a basement with the drums about to drop, while the DJ spins garage cuts. Dancing with his band, making music which speaks not just to the hardships of their lives, but the joys too. Dancing with his best friend Adeline, two-stepping around the living room, crooning and grooving, so close their heads might touch. Dancing alone, at home, to his father's records, uncovering parts of a man he has never truly known.Stephen has only ever known himself in song. But what becomes of him when the music fades? When his father begins to speak of shame and sacrifice, when his home is no longer his own? How will he find space for himself: a place where he can feel beautiful, a place he might feel free?Set over the course of three summers in Stephen's life, from London to Ghana and back again, Small Worlds is an exhilarating and expansive novel about the worlds we build for ourselves, the worlds we live, dance and love within.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America—and the search for what it means to call a place home. • From the award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Half of a Yellow Sun • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR"An expansive, epic love story."—O, The Oprah MagazineOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsIfemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is "dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise." —San Francisco Chronicle

A Young Woman From Nigeria Leaves Behind Her Home And Her First Love To Start A New Life In America, Only To Find Her Dreams Are Not All She Expected. Ifemelu -- Beautiful, Self-assured -- Left Nigeria 15 Years Ago, And Now Studies In Princeton As A Graduate Fellow. She Seems To Have Fulfilled Every Immigrant's Dream: Ivy League Education; Success As A Writer Of A Popular Political Blog; Money For The Things She Needs. But What Came Before Is More Like A Nightmare: Painful Departure From Family; Humiliating Jobs Under A False Name. She Feels For The First Time The Weight Of Something She Didn't Think About Back Home: Race. Obinze -- Handsome And Kind-hearted -- Was Ifemelu's Teenage Love. He'd Hoped To Join Her In America, But Post-9/11 America Wouldn't Take Him. His Journey Leads Him Through Back Alleys Of Illegal Employment In London; To A Fake Marriage For The Sake Of A Work Card; And Finally To A Set Of Handcuffs As He Is Exposed And Deported. Yet Once Home He Too Finds Success -- As The Kind Of 'big Man' In Lagos He'd Scorned In His Youth. One Day, Answering A Text Message From Obinze That She Cannot Resist, Ifemelu Decides To Return Home, Only To Discover She's Become An 'americanah' -- A Different Version Of Herself, One With A New Accent And Attitude. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

It's the early 1990s and three young people are looking to change their lives, and perhaps also the world. Attracted to the ambitious global peacekeeping work of the UN, Andrew, Ken and Heidi's paths cross in Cambodia, from where their fates are to become inextricably bound.Over the coming years, their stories interweave through countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - war-torn, lawless places where the intervention of the UN is needed like nowhere else. Driven by idealism, the three struggle to do the best they can, caught up in an increasingly tangled web of bureaucracy and ineffectual leadership. As disillusionment sets in, they attempt to keep hold of their humanity through black humour, revelry and 'emergency sex'. Brutal and moving in equal measure, Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) explores pressing global issues while never losing a sense of the personal. Deeply critical of the West's indifference to developing countries and the UN's repeated failure to intervene decisively, the book provoked massive controversy on its initial publication. Kofi Annan called for the book to be banned, and debate was sparked about the future direction of the UN. Brilliantly written and mordantly funny, it is a book that continues to make waves.

The New York Times #1 Bestseller Oprah Book Club Pick 'one Of The Best Books I Have Ever Read In My Entire Life. I Haven't Felt This Way Since I First Read Beloved . . .' Oprah Winfrey Lose Yourself In The Stunning Debut Novel Everyone Is Talking About - The Unmissable Historical Story Of Injustice And Redemption That Resonates Powerfully Today Hiram Walker Is A Man With A Secret, And A War To Win. A War For The Right To Life, To Family, To Freedom. Born Into Bondage On A Virginia Plantation, He Is Also Born Gifted With A Mysterious Power That He Won't Discover Until He Is Almost A Man, When He Risks Everything For A Chance To Escape. One Fateful Decision Will Carry Him Away From His Makeshift Plantation Family And Into The Heart Of The Underground War On Slavery... 'a Transcendent Work From A Crucial Political And Literary Artist' Diana Evans 'i've Been Wondering Who Might Fill The Intellectual Void That Plagued Me After James Baldwin Died. Clearly It Is Ta-nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison

New York Times Bestseller • Pulitzer Prize Finalist • An Oprah's Book Club Selection“Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa.The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil.The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Here, the power of Diop’s acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin’s crisp translation and a compelling afterword by Diop. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide.

New York Times Bestseller • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 • New York Public Library’s Best Book of 2018 • NPR’s Book Concierge Best Book of 2018 • Economist Book of the Year • SELF.com’s Best Books of 2018 • Audible’s Best of the Year • BookRiot’s Best Audio Books of 2018 • The Atlantic’s Books Briefing: History, Reconsidered • Atlanta Journal Constitution, Best Southern Books 2018 • The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Books 2018 •“A profound impact on Hurston’s literary legacy.”―New York Times“One of the greatest writers of our time.”―Toni Morrison“Zora Neale Hurston’s genius has once again produced a Maestrapiece.”―Alice WalkerA major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade―abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo’s past―memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo’s unique vernacular, and written from Hurston’s perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture.

New York Times Bestseller • An Oprah Book Club Pick“Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book ReviewTaking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Powerful, compassionate and ultimately hopeful. Observer WINNER OF THE COSTA CHILDREN'S BOOK AWARD 2021 and the Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week - a trailblazing novel about two teenagers from opposite worlds; The Crossing is a profound story of hope, grief, and the very real tragedies of the refugee crisis. The sea carries our pain. The stars carry our future. Natalie's world is falling apart. She's just lost her mum and her brother marches the streets of Dover full of hate and anger. Swimming is her only refuge. Sammy has fled his home and family in Eritrea for the chance of a new life in Europe. Every step he takes on his journey is a step into an unknown and unwelcoming future. A twist of fate brings them together and gives them both hope. But is hope enough to mend a broken world? 'Skilful, involving and important, this deserves it's accolades' The Sunday Times'Powerful, uplifting, hopeful' Guardian