Susan Straight
1) Mecca
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A California epic following several native, diverse Californians grasping for air in a world that continues to marginalize them"--
Johnny Frías has California in his blood. A descendant of the state's Indigenous people and Mexican settlers, he has Southern California's forgotten towns and canyons in his soul. He spends his days as a highway patrolman pulling over speeders, ignoring their racist insults, and pushing past the trauma of his rookie...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From National Book Award finalist Susan Straight comes a haunting historical novel about a Louisiana slave girl's perilous journey to freedom.Daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew, Moinette is a house maid on a plantation south of New Orleans. At fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Bright, imaginative and well aware of everything she risks, Moinette at once begins to prepare for...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
From the author of A Million Nightingales (“a writer of exceptional gifts and grace”—Joyce Carol Oates) comes a luminous new novel about the forces that tear families apart and the ties that bind them together.
Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her happily away from her Southern California home. When she returns to mark the fifth anniversary
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family,...
6) Brazil-Maru
Author
Language
English
Description
An "immensely entertaining" historical novel about Japanese immigrants and their struggle to make a home in a Brazilian rainforest (Newsday).
In 1925, a band of Japanese immigrants arrive in Brazil to carve a utopia out of the jungle. Yamashita conjures "an intricate and fascinating epoch" (San Diego Review) where the dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the...
In 1925, a band of Japanese immigrants arrive in Brazil to carve a utopia out of the jungle. Yamashita conjures "an intricate and fascinating epoch" (San Diego Review) where the dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the...
Author
Language
English
Description
In August in Rio Seco, California, the ground is too hard to bury a body. But Glorette Picard is dead, and across the canal, out in the orange groves, they'll gather shovels and pickaxes and soak the dirt until they can lay her coffin down. First, someone needs to find her son Victor, who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock, and someone needs to tell her uncle Enrique, who will be the one to hunt down her killer, and someone needs to...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A new anthology of cocaine stories from the creators of The Speed Chronicles—“Caution: these stories are addicting” (Harlan Coben).
This ambitious anthology of jaw-grinding criminal behavior is masterfully curated by acclaimed authors Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon. Cocaine is the subject, the whys and whereofs in The Cocaine Chronicles, a collection of original short stories that are funny and harrowing,...
This ambitious anthology of jaw-grinding criminal behavior is masterfully curated by acclaimed authors Gary Phillips and Jervey Tervalon. Cocaine is the subject, the whys and whereofs in The Cocaine Chronicles, a collection of original short stories that are funny and harrowing,...