Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in African American

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris. When his marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

September, 1943. Tuscany, Italy. In the hilltop town of Barga, everyone holds their breath. Even the bells fall silent. Everything Vittoria Guidi knows and loves is at risk. German troops occupy the mountains around her home, as America's Buffalo Soldiers prepare to invade. As Vittoria's country is torn in two, so is her conscience. Should she side with her Scots-Italian father or her Fascist mother? Should she do what she is told - or what she believes in?

As teenagers, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love in a Nigeria under military dictatorship. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America, where Obinze hopes to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, after so long apart and so many changes, will they find the courage to meet again, face to face?

Here are three things you should know about my husband: 1. He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado. 2. He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. 3. On New Year’s Eve, he killed himself. And here is one thing you should know about me: 1. I found him. Bonus fact: No. I am not okay.

Anuri's stepmother, Ophelia, is the ultimate 'mumfluencer'. Throughout Anuri's childhood, she catalogued every minute, milestone and carefully curated family outing on social media, cultivating a devoted—and sizable—following. Now twenty-five years old, life looks pretty perfect on the outside. Ophelia's fans could be forgiven for wondering why Anuri spends much of her time insulting men online for money, battling the call of alcohol, running from a PhD application, and reminding herself that she is now allowed to choose her own outfits.

The Day I Fell Off My Island tells the story of Erna Mullings, a teenage Jamaican girl uprooted from her island following the sudden death of her beloved grandmother. When Erna is sent to England to be reunited with her siblings, she dreads leaving behind her elderly grandfather, and the only life she has ever known. A new future unfolds, in a strange country and with a mother she barely recognises. The next decade will be a complex journey of estrangement and arrival, new beginnings and the uncovering of long-buried secrets.

Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she's covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home. Bringing us her truth in an arresting, unsparing Trinidadian voice, Alethea unravels memories repressed since childhood and begins to understand the person she has become. Her next step is to decide the woman she wants to be.

Jim Crow Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert Stephens Jr., who for a trivial scuffle with a white boy is sent to The Gracetown School for Boys. But the segregated reformatory is a chamber of horrors, haunted by the boys that have died there.

Chaurisse and Dana have a lot in common. They both grew up in Atlanta, they shop at the same stores, visit the same restaurants. But unlike Chaurisse, Dana knows the truth: that the girls share the same father. A father with two families, one of which he is determined to keep secret. When the girls meet and become friends, the unsteady balance of both their lives is threatened. Theirs is a relationship destined to explode.

A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy. Dan Freeman, the 'spook who sat by the door', is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as 'Freedom Fighters' in this explosive, award-winning novel.

In the mid-1800s, Saint, an enigmatic and powerful conjure woman, always flanked by a silent companion, travels the South annihilating plantations and liberating the enslaved by means of purposeful violence and powerful magic. She founds a town for those she has freed–and for them alone. They name the town Ours. Surrounded by an impenetrable magical border raised by Saint's powers, Ours is invisible to the outer world and sits blissfully away from prying eyes and violent hands. Saint's mission is to kill slavery–to scourge its damage from the minds of her charges and to keep them safe forever.

From West Africa to Windsor Castle, The Other Princess is a vivid imagining of the life of Queen Victoria's Black goddaughter, shining a light on a woman searching for home, love and identity.

Brenton Brown is 16 years old. A mixed race youth, Brenton has lived in a children's home all his life. Being reunited with his mother is the best thing that has happened to Brenton. But a strange series of events soon push him to the edge...

August is a God-fearing track star who leaves Enugu City to attend university and escape his overbearing sisters. He carries the weight of their lofty expectations, the shame of facing himself, and the haunting memory of a mother he never knew. It's his first semester and pressures aside, August is making friends and doing well in his classes. He even almost has a girlfriend. There's only one problem: he can't stop thinking about Segun, an openly gay student who works at a local cybercafé.

Michael and Francis are the bright, ambitious sons of Trinidadian immigrants. Coming of age in the outskirts of a sprawling city, the brothers battle against careless prejudices and low expectations. While Francis aspires to a future in music, Michael dreams of Aisha, the smartest girl in their school, whose eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But one sweltering summer night the hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably cut short.

A young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family, menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night, a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort and cruelty.

Juliet is consumed with guilt knowing that her half-brother, Brenton, grew up in children's homes while she received all her mother's love. She marries Clayton, a successful banker, to please her mother. But secretly Clayton has always suspected that there is something between Juliet and her half-brother. Meanwhile, Juliet and Brenton try to stay away from what they know is a forbidden love...

A 13-year-old girl watches her white best friend totter along the edge of a building roof; a woman who lost her child in its first trimester finds empathy and horror in the waters of a city aquarium; a mother protects her teen daughter from a predatory love interest by taking revenge over a very French supper; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their dead father's ashes - rediscovering one another and reckoning with all the ways that trust can be betrayed and love can be redeemed.

Having a crush on her drop-dead-gorgeous boss could get Hopewell General intern Jaclyn Campbell fired... especially with the prestigious Virginia hospital reeling from a shocking scandal. But head resident Lucien De Winter is impossible to resist. And he’s arousing a healthy dose of desire as he wages an all-out war to make the sheltered Southern belle his own. Because Lucien knows that the only thing to cure his acute condition is a lifetime of love.

Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an America that's coming undone. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent, devastating miscarriage and Noah's fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world.