Ocean State Libraries

The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic that has been translated into more than 40 languages.

Detective Alex Cross tells the story of an ancestor, Abraham Cross, and his experiences with lawyer Ben Corbett, recounting one man's pursuit of justice in the face of the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan racism and violence in 1906 Eudora, Mississippi.

"This book is an historic literary event: the publication of a newly discovered novel, the earliest known work from Harper Lee, the beloved, bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, To kill a mockingbird. Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go set a watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To kill a mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Go set a watchman...

"Grief-stricken and with his world collapsing around him, Penn Cage is shut out of trial preparations by his once-revered Southern doctor father, who is about to be tried for murder in the wake of revelations about a mixed-race child and KKK associations." --

"Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother's footsteps as a midwife; and their master's daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to...

"Novel set in the south during the Great Depression that takes an entirely fresh view on big American themes-- race, heredity, inequality, shame-- set in a time of financial crisis and racialized violence"-- "Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a...

“Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., TIME

From the renowned author of the classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth is brilliantly crafted, moving, and wise. With a new introduction by National Book Award-winning author and scholar...

"Two-time Edgar Award-winning author Lori Roy entangles readers in a heart-pounding tale of two women battling for survival against a century's worth of hate. On the day a black truck rattles past her house and a Klan flyer lands in her front yard, ten-year-old Beth disappears from her Simmonsville, Georgia, home. Armed with skills honed while caring for an alcoholic mother, she must battle to survive the days and months ahead. Seven years later,...

In a racially divided Alabama town in the 1930s, widowed lawyer Atticus Finch agrees to defend a young black man accused of raping a white woman, teaching his children valuable lessons about prejudice and empathy.

"Spanning 30 years of American history, from the twilight of Kennedy's Camelot to the days leading up to Bill Clinton's election, We Are All Good People Here explores the intimate and complex friendship between Eve Whalen and Daniella Strum. Eve, privileged child of an old Atlanta family, meets Daniella in the fall of 1962, on their first day at the all-girls Belmont College in Virginia, where the two are paired as roommates and become fast friends....