Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...

A Black mother and daughter spend each day waiting for the return of their husband/father from his job as an EMT. They manage to fill the hours, and are always so relieved when he returns safely to them, especially as they read and see on the news that some Black people do not return home.

Lottie Rebecca Lee is spoken into the world in Fayetteville, North Carolina by a Black nurse who declares, "Lord Jesus, if that ain't the blackest little baby born this side of heaven." Later, Lottie will prove that she is the ancestors' promise to unearth the Mississippi and Ghanaian atrocities that have tormented Benjamin Lee, her grandfather, who was born during the Great Depression in Mississippi's red clay tobacco fields, and Benjamin Junior,...

With a little help from her mom, Parker tries to turn a bad day into a good one.

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them...

Isaiah "Ice" Abernathy has always worshiped his older brother, Seth. For years they've been not just brothers but best friends--and as Seth starts his senior year, Ice is eager to spend as much time with his brother as he can, making memories before Seth goes to college. But when Seth announces he's leaving much earlier than expected, and then he misses an important event--one he'd promised to attend--it causes a major fight. Filled with regret, Ice...