Washoe County Library System

"A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it....

"Cedric The Entertainer's debut novel Flipping Boxcars is a valentine to close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. The story is also an homage to Cedric's grandfather, who in this tale emerges as Babe.He is a charismatic and widely loved man. He is also a gambler, whose gift of gab often gets him out of tricky situations, which is often. Babe is also a dreamer, something he shares in common with...

In the mid 1700s, Hallie Brady, hopelessly married to a fool, finds herself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a few other families. For shelter from the oncoming winter, the group digs in and Hallie becomes the founder of Blackwell, Massachusetts. Over the centuries, the people and landscape of Blackwell have changed, but the red garden, the land where Hallie's house originally stood, has endured.

"Twenty-six and broke, Skye didn't think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye moves through life entirely--and unrepentantly--on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Her personal life might be a mess, and no one would be surprised if she died alone in a hotel room, but at least she's free to do as she pleases. But then a twelve-year-old girl shows...

Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother's disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman—especially a Black woman—can find herself on trial for witchcraft. But fourteen years have passed since her mother’s...

The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a black girl in an America whose love for its blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

"When white silver screen icon Kitty Karr Tate dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the three Black St. John sisters, it prompts questions. A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty's affairs thandeal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty's journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could--and between a cheating fiancae and fallout from a controversial...

Returning to her ramshackle home in the Mississippi Delta after thirty years, Billie James investigates the accident that killed her famous poet father as well as rumors that she went missing the day he died. Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident...

"An elegant, stirring, insistent new book bearing out actions taken and not taken, from the acclaimed National Book Award finalist"-- "A Must-Read: The New York Times, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, The Boston Globe, Shondaland, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Essence, Literary Hub From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken. What does it mean to really see the world around...

After learning she might not be able to have children, thirty-three-year-old Tabitha Walker, a black woman planning to "have it all," watches her dreams dissolve and must rely on her two best friends to get through.