For August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything. August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful promise there...

A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream?the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy Named one of BuzzFeed 's "Incredible New Books You Need to Read This Summer" Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his...

A New York TimesRed at the BoneDeep SouthHomegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer--that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called "Double Consciousness, "a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since...