Celebrate Black History Month with Historical Fiction!

A delicious sauce. A stolen recipe. The exploitation of Black people. Those are the ingredients at the heart of The Rib King in which a down-on-their-luck family decides to market their cook’s delicious rib sauce using an awful caricature of their groundskeeper, August Sitwell, on the label. But neither August nor the cook, “Miss Mamie,” will ever see a dime, leading to a rage in August that will eventually explode into tragedy.

After the Civil War, a family wracked by the loss of their son hire on two brothers freed by the Emancipation Proclamation to work on their farm, hoping the friendship will help staunch their grief. Parallel to their story, a pair of Confederate soldiers meet for secret trysts in the woods. But when they’re caught, the repercussions wreak havoc through the entire community. In the aftermath, it is the farmer’s wife, Isabella, who emerges as an unlikely leader, trying to bring a sense of community and healing to the land and the newly free citizens of Old Ox.

Carolina Built is a novelization of real-life real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary building an incredible legacy for herself in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. Alongside tending to her husband, daughters, and extended family, Josephine becomes a self-taught businesswoman, determined to build herself a legacy from the ground up.

Rue inherited her mother’s gift for healing, something she witnessed first hand growing up on a plantation and has now started practicing for herself as a midwife in a community celebrating their newly-won freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. But not everyone appreciates Rue’s work, work that can be dangerous when you’re dealing so closely with life and death. Whispers and suspicion begin to spread in the aftermath of a child born that the townspeople believe to be cursed. Rue is no witch. But she is hiding a secret that could destroy everything if anyone were to find out, a secret that goes all the way back to her childhood.

Part heist novel and part love letter to 1960s Harlem, Harlem Shuffle follows Ray Carney, a man descended from a long line of crooks trying to make it as an upstanding salesman of furniture. But when he’s volunteered as the fence for a heist on the Hotel Teresa that doesn’t go as planned, his business goes from being on the up-and-up to a clientele of shady cops and gangsters. There might not be any way out of this mess, but Ray is determined to find one that keeps him–and his furniture store–alive and well.

Disowned by her family and with nowhere to go, sixteen-year old Mattie Banks boards a bus hoping to ride away from disaster. Instead, she witnesses a landmark moment in Civil Right’s history as Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat. It’s a moment that will change the course of her life forever and send ripples through the generations, as, many years later, her granddaughter uncovers shocking secrets and must reckon with keeping the peace or honoring her grandmother’s wishes.