George Reynolds Branch 
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There are a total of 173 valid entries on the list.
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Growing up Black in rural North Carolina, Ray McMillian’s life is already mapped out. If he’s lucky, he’ll get a job at the hospital cafeteria. If he’s extra lucky, he’ll earn more than minimum wage. But Ray has a gift and a dream—he’s determined to become a world-class professional violinist, and nothing will stand in his way. Not his mother, who wants him to stop making such a racket; not the fact that he can’t afford a violin suitable...
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"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
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"Dixon was once an Olympic-level runner. But he missed the team by two-tenths of a second, and ever since that pain decades ago, he hasn't allowed a goal to consume him. But when his charming older brother, Nate, suggests that they attempt to be the first Black American men to summit Mount Everest, Dixon can't refuse. The brothers are determined to prove something--to themselves and to each other. Dixon interrupts his orderly life as a school psychologist,...
4. Blackward
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"Tired of feeling like you don't belong? Join the club. It's called the Section. You'd think a spot to chill, chat, and find community would be much easier to come by for nerdy, queer punks. But when four longtime, bookish BFFs Lika, Amor, Lala, and Tony can't find what they need, they take matters into their own hands and create a space where they can be a hundred percent who they are: Black, queer, and weird. The group puts a call out for all awkward...
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In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. This book touches down in Sunflower, Alabama, the red-dirt...
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"An elegant, stirring, insistent new book bearing out actions taken and not taken, from the acclaimed National Book Award finalist"--
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"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...
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"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows"--
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"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 march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take."--...
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"Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who's perennially trying to disappear into something: a codependent friendship, an ill-advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply, the ether. These days it's a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment. Then, after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best...
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A "novel about two upper-class stay-at-home mothers--one white, one Black--living in a 'perfect' suburb that explores motherhood, friendship, and the true meaning of sisterhood amidst the backdrop of America's all-too-familiar racial reckoning"--
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"After losing her child and seeing the world as an increasingly dangerous place, a young Black woman from Boston decides to construct a separate society at an abandoned restaurant in Western Massachusetts. She locates a benefactor and soon it all begins to take shape, but it doesn't take long for problems to develop"--
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"A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead."--Publisher's description.
14. Touched: a novel
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"Martin Just wakes up one morning after what feels like, and might actually be, a centuries-long sleep with two new innate pieces of knowledge: Humanity is a virus destined to destroy all existence. And he is the Cure. Martin begins slipping into an alternate consciousness, with new physical strengths, to violently defend his family--the only Black family in their neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles--against pure evil."--
15. Company: stories
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"The Collins family is followed through a series of stories in which they meet, bicker, compete, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure with different guests in each story."--
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In this debut novel, "a high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post"--
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"In this big-hearted debut about ambition, race, and class, a family grapples with how much of their lineage they're willing to unearth in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program. Almost a decade ago, Willie Revel gave up her burgeoning journalism career in New York to help run her father's struggling construction company in Philadelphia. An ambitious single mother, Willie has reluctantly put family first without being...
18. Memphis: a novel
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"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
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A Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings' family explores America's racial reckoning through the prism of her ancestors-both the enslaver and the enslaved. Gayle Jessup White had long heard the stories passed down from her father's family, that they were direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson—lore she firmly believed, though others did not. For four decades the acclaimed journalist and genealogy enthusiast researched her connection...
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"In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by people fleeing enslavement in the American south, young Lensinda Martin works for a crusading Black journalist. One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman who recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before...