With All of Me, Berry again delivers a compelling, humorous, and poignant story on a subject that plagues half the women in America -- weight. Serpentine Williamson has a good life: an exciting career as a television reporter in Chicago, a sexy boyfriend, membership in a popular gospel choir, and a family who loves her. But in the midst of her positives lies a powerful negative -- her lifelong struggle with weight.After years of buying into fads and labels, Serpentine finds her world crumbling. And, finally losing the battle to uphold her plummeting self-esteem, she breaks down and needs to be hospitalized. All of Me is a heartwarming, inspiring, and often funny chronicle of Serpentine's fight for recovery. As she learns to meet her challenges with dignity and strength she also learns to love herself, for the first time, just the way she is. All of Me will resonate with women of all shapes and sizes and will once again affirm Venise Berry as a fresh voice in African-American women's fiction, whose snappy characters, according to Rosalyn McMillan, "double-dare you to put the book down."

    She is a stay-at-home mother-of-three with boundless reserves of patience, energy, and love. After being friends for a decade, this is how Liz sees Jess. Then one moment changes everything. Dark thoughts and carefully guarded secrets surface—and Liz is left questioning everything she thought she knew about her friend, and about herself. The truth can’t come soon enough.

    Years of suppressed heartbreak and disappointment overwhelm her and the fine thread of sanity finally snaps. Consequently, having thrown the entire contents of her house onto the street, she's found by the police, lying on her back under a Christmas tree with an empty bottle of Port and a half-eaten lump of Stilton. Charlotte needs to claw her way back from the brink and start again. But can she build a bigger, brighter, and better existence this time around? "The Defrosting of Charlotte Small" is wonderfully observed and genuinely funny, mining the glorious seam of black humour that is fast becoming Annabel Giles' trademark.

    Amid the strange, disjointed rhythms of her days and nights and another impending winter in upstate New York, Ari is a tree without roots, struggling to keep her branches aloft.When Mina, a one-time cult musician — older, self-contained, alone, and nine-months pregnant —moves to town, Ari sees the possibility of a new friend, despite her unfortunate habit of generally mistrusting women. Soon they become comrades-in-arms, and the previously hostile terrain seems almost navigable.With piercing insight, purifying anger, and outrageous humor, Elisa Albert issues a wake-up call to a culture that turns its new mothers into exiles, and expects them to act like natives. Like Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Anne Enright’s The Gathering, this is a daring and resonant novel from one of our most visceral writers.

    Now approaching forty, Skye moves through life entirely--and unrepentantly--on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Her personal life might be a mess, and no one would be surprised if she died alone in a hotel room, but at least she's free to do as she pleases. But then a twelve-year-old girl shows up during one of Skye's brief visits to her hometown of Philadelphia, and tells Skye that she's "her egg." Skye's life is thrown into sharp relief and she decides that it might be time to actually try to have a meaningful relationship with another human being. Spoiler alert: It's not easy.Things gets even more complicated when Skye realizes that the woman she tried and failed to pick up the other day is the girl's aunt and now it's awkward. All the while, her brother is trying to get in touch, her problematic mother is being bewilderingly kind, and the West Philly pool halls and hoagie shops of her youth have been replaced by hipster cafes.Told in a fresh, lively voice, this novel is a relentlessly clever, deeply moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.

    The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . .

    But when his son is taken away from him, he's left with nothing but the Memphis bar he manages. Then he hires Fay, a young white waitress, who has a volatile brother named Carl in tow. Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft -- Fay and Carl's dead father -- and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met. But his sympathies for these lost souls soon take him down a twisting path into the lives of strangers...

    She doesn't understand why her father leaves each night with a mysterious box or why her mama drinks so much. What Florence knows are sultry days spent with her grandparents, being cared for by their maid, Zenie, on the colored side of town.Tension builds during the summer of 1963. Mama bakes cakes at all hours to scrape by. And Zenie's niece Eva is in town, selling insurance to the blacks and stepping on Mr. Forrest's toes. When Eva is brutally assaulted, all hell breaks loose: Mama crashes her car, Florence's grandfather dies, a woman is murdered, and Florence finally gets a look in Daddy's box.Florence sees things that summer that she won't understand for years to come: her mother's disappearance, her father's racism. Years later, she'll face the truth and how she was caught in the middle of it. The Queen of Palmyra is rich in both setting and characters. It's an affecting tale of a girl who is loved yet lost, trying to make sense of the world in a tumultuous time, finally forced to confront the sins of her father.

    Once Tilly--whose condition is deemed undiagnosable--is kicked out of the last school in the area, her mother Alexandra is out of ideas. The family turns to Camp Harmony and the wisdom of child behavior guru Scott Bean for a solution. But what they discover in the woods of New Hampshire will push them to the very limit. Told from the alternating perspectives of both Alexandra and her younger daughter Iris (the book's Nick Carraway), this is a unputdownable story about the strength of love, the bonds of family, and how you survive the unthinkable.

    Now adults living in London, their past in full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family's daring and terrifying attempt to escape, which ended in tragedy; but the fall-out from that single event remains elusive. Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for the archive, making his way through old files, piecing together the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession. When Ella is left a stash of notebooks by her mother, and she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin, her fate clashes with Aaron's, and together they piece together the details of Ella's past ... and a family destroyed.Devastating and beautifully written, funny and life-affirming, CONFESSIONS WITH BLUE HORSES explores intimate family life and its strength in the most difficult of circumstances.

    In this debut collection of stories, each of them navigate life’s “training school”—with its lessons on gentrification and respectability—while fighting to create a vibrant sense of self in this love letter to Washington, DC.

    Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door - an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter.Thanks to his thriving local business, Brad Whitman is something of a celebrity around town, and he's made a small fortune on his customer service and charm, while his wife, Julia, escaped her trailer park upbringing for the security of marriage and homemaking. Their new house is more than she ever imagined for herself, and who wouldn't want to live in Oak Knoll? With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers. Told from multiple points of view, A Good Neighborhood asks big questions about life in America today―What does it mean to be a good neighbor? How do we live alongside each other when we don't see eye to eye?―as it explores the effects of class, race, and heartrending star-crossed love in a story that’s as provocative as it is powerful.

    The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This collection explores femininity and race in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, and Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing and rewriting bodies, stories, and histories of the past, as well as uttering and bearing witness to the truth of the present, and actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology and sorrow, of vulnerability and posturing, of desire and disgust, of tragedy and excellence.

    The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire.Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).

    She knows what thrills, angers, and motivates them, and she shares the secrets that spill out from under hair dryers with heartbreaking and often hilarious candor. At Blessings, Patricia Brown's Los Angeles salon, we listen in on the dish and the drama and get real with the four unforgettable women who work there. Pat is the owner and matriarch of the salon, and she presides over Blessings with a kind but commanding air-- preventing fiery arguments, smoothing over conflicts, and lending a sympathetic ear to those who need it. But she may never get a chance to be a mother of her own children. After discovering she is infertile, she embarks on a mission to adopt a child, but learns that the process is filled with more anguish than she expected.Zuma is Blessings' star stylist, and she knows it. This brash diva is a self-described superwoman committed to making her dream of being both a businesswoman and a mom come true. She's got so much confidence that she has vowed to get artificially inseminated if she doesn't find Mr. Right soon-- and she secretly hopes that this will eradicate the indescribable sorrow lingering from the abortion she had years ago.Faye, another stylist, can't quite forget the memory of her late husband. Lonely and overweight, she turns to food to dull the pain of raising her two children alone. Her daughter has grown up into an explosive young woman, and her little boy is learning the hard way how to survive in the world without a dad. But companionship and support will come along when she's least expecting it.Sandy, the manicurist, is still searching for her own fulfillment and can't be bothered with the needs of her two small kids. Though she makes no apologies for her highly neglectful mothering, she ultimately makes a mother's biggest sacrifice.Written with Jackson's trademark skill and sass, "Blessings" paints a deeply moving picture of female struggle and triumph. As Pat, Zuma, Faye, and Sandy laugh, weep, argue, and console each other, Jackson reveals the priceless, inextricable bond between motherhood and sisterhood, and shows why she's become a beloved chronicler of the hearts and minds of women.