Lamar Public Library

"The daughter of a prostitute mother and an alcoholic father, Maggie Franklin knew her only way out was to marry someone upstanding and church-going. Someone like Hubert Wiggins, the most eligible man in Lexington, Alabama--and the son of its most revered preacher. Proper and prosperous, Hubert is glad to finally have a wife, even one with Maggie's background. For Hubert has a secret he desperately needs to stay hidden. And Maggie's unexpected charm,...

"For the life of him, William "Scoob" Lamar can't seem to stay out of trouble, and now the run-ins at school have led to lockdown at home. So when G'ma, Scoob's favorite person on Earth, asks him to go on an impromptu road trip, he's in the RV faster than he can say FREEDOM. With G'ma's old maps and a strange pamphlet called the 'Travelers' Green Book' at their side, the pair takes off on a journey down G'ma's memory lane. But adventure quickly turns...

A young slave stitches a quilt with a map pattern which guides her to freedom in the North.

Eli, a Washington, D.C. storeowner, is inadvertently shot by the young son of a taxi cab driver. In a panic, his mom kidnaps the wounded Eli and flees to her hometown of Waterproof, Louisiana. Arriving at the home of her estranged family, its not long before a dark childhood secret is revealed. An emotionally-charged, faith-based story that focuses on the interaction of a stranger and a family torn apart by a long-buried secret.

"A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands...

This "bold...extraordinary...blockbuster..." (Newsweek magazine) begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree. When Alex Haley was a boy growing up in Tennessee, his grandmother used to tell him stories about their family, stories that...

"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...

Terry McMillan takes on the fault lines of midlife and family life, reminds us once again of the redeeming power of friendship, and turns her eye toward the dilemma of how a woman starts to put her own needs higher on the to-do list while not shortchanging everyone else.

Welcome to turn-of-the-century America, where Scott Joplin's ragtime sets the beat and passionate vitality sets the tone. Historical figures such as J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Evelyn Nesbitt mingle with the fictional characters of a Lower East Side Jewish peddler, a black musician from Harlem, and a rebellious young middle-class WASP in this classic novel.

A large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. Set in two privileged worlds, the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school, it tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime. Judge Oliver Garland has just died suddenly. A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial,...