Butler, Octavia E

When Dana, a woman from the twentieth century, is brought back in time by her slave-owning ancestor, Rufus, when his life is endangered, she must save him in order to live out her own life in the future.

A young African-American woman is mysteriously transfered back in time leading to an irresistable curiosity about her family's past.

Dana is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Dana, who is Black, has been summoned to save Rufus, the White son of a plantation owner, who is drowning. She is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters and each time her stays grow longer and more dangerous. She begins to worry that her 21st century life is ending and she will be asked to live permanently in the 19th century as a slave.

Dana, a young black writer, can't explain how she is transported across time and space from her loving home in 1970s California to a plantation in Maryland. But she does quickly understand why: to deal with the troubles of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder - and her progenitor. Her survival, her very existence, depends on it.

An African-American woman, living in an increasingly violent society, must choose between her daughter, her community, and the religious group she has recently founded.

Collects the four novels in Octavia E. Butler's Patternist series, which follows the creation of powerful race of madmen in ancient Africa that come together in a telepathic pattern as the Earth is threatened by a cosmic invasion.

An entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex, Doro fears no one until he meets Anyanwu, who can absorb bullets and make medicine with a kiss, give birth to tribes, and savage anyone who threatens those she loves.

Anyanwu hopes that the magic that was given to her is strong enough to save the people she loves from Doro, a mind force who is tormenting and killing anything that gets in the way of his ultimate goal, creating others as evil as he is.