"Labor organizer Padma Mehta is on the edge of space and the edge of burnout. All she wants is to buy out a little rum distillery and retire, but she's supposed to recruit 500 people to the Union before she can. She's only thirty-three short. So when a small-time con artist tells her about forty people ready to tumble down the space elevator to break free from her old bosses, she checks it out - against her better judgment. It turns out, of course,...

Alex Cross left his hometown, and some awful family tragedies, for a better life with Nana Mama in Washington, DC. He hasn't looked back. Now his cousin Stefan has been accused of a horrible, unthinkable murder, and Cross drives south with Bree, Nana Mama, Jannie, and Ali to Starksville, North Carolina, for the first time in thirty-five years. Back home, he discovers a once proud community down on its luck, and local residents who don't welcome him...

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends. Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from...

One of a very few National Book Award honorees to be nominated for fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen creates a curious blend of both in this tragic prequel to Killing Mister Watson and Lost Man's River. An amazing novel in its own right, Bone by Bone caps the trilogy featuring the enigmatic E.J. Watson. During the Reconstruction Era, Edgar Watson grew up in the South at the mercy of a brutal alcoholic father and a vindictive mother. Witnessing...

Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting debut novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution - a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom. When the cane fields start to burn, K. C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony...

Two years after being tossed from the detective bureau for using questionable tactics while catching a child molester, deputy Tim Hallett's life is finally on track. Assigned to a special K-9 unit with the best partner in the world, a Belgian Malinois named Rocky, Hallett has finally learned to balance police work with his family life. But that all changes in the heat of a Florida sugarcane field.

First published in 1923, Jean Toomer's Cane is an innovative literary work part drama, part poetry, part fiction powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published...

Produced by Oprah Winfrey, award winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Melissa Carter. After a family tragedy forces them back together, the Bordelons must navigate the triumphs and struggles of their complicated lives in order to run an ailing sugarcane farm in the Deep South.

Many people in the world today see those who do not look like them, or who speak differently as being separate; as "other." Relations challenges the human illusion of separation, illuminating the connections that link us all as humans, different though equal in every way. In this powerful anthology, new and established storytellers reshape the narratives that restrict and subjugate, revealing the truth of our shared humanity despite differences such...