domestic fiction

San Francisco ghostwriter Ruth Young finally begins to understand her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother LuLing's preoccupation with ghosts and curses when she reads LuLing's writings of her dark backwoods childhood in 1920s China-- where LuLing's mute, disfigured nursemaid committed suicide, and a nearby cave held what may have been the bones of the lost ancient hominid Peking Man.

Maurice Dupree is torn between his feelings for Omenita Jones and his mother's obsession for him to become the first African-American lawyer in his hometown.

Sapphire, having inherited the qualities of perseverance and strength from her mother, a woman forced into slavery in 1749, passes on those traits to successive generations of African-American women as they struggle to triumph over rape, humiliation, poverty, and scandal.

Jason, son of a prostitute and pimp, decides to take the same path as his father, but Chinaka, a former Black Panther and old friend of his mother, tries to set him straight.

The three Lovejoy sisters are reunited in their hometown of Mulberry, Georgia when their mother dies, and vow to bury years of anger and pain along with their hateful parent.

Charts the lives of two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, who come to start new lives and pursue dreams of self-reliance and freedom on a desolate, windswept island off the coast of Southern California.

In 1923, African American Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia, settles in Philadelphia, marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, loses her first-born twins, and raises her next nine children to face a world that will not love them.

After her parent's divorce, Lizzy and her mother move to upstate New York to live with Lizzy's grandparents, and Lizzy tries to adjust not only to a new city, but to the physical and emotional changes she is experiencing.

Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England.

Presents Dickens's 1853 novel which tells the story of several generations of the Jarndyce family who wait in vain to inherit money that is tied up in a legal dispute in England's notoriously slow-moving Court of Chancery.