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 One of TIME's 100 Must Read Books of 2020 

“One of the smartest young writers of her generation.”—Book Riot

From New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing Morgan Jerkins, a powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. 

Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history. 

Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America’s past and present, one family’s legacy, and a young black woman’s life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.

 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a foreword by the author and a new introduction by Tayari Jones.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

“A rhapsodic work. . . . 

Intricate and inventive.” —The New Yorker

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world. 

Purchase on Amazon:  Song of Solomon: A Novel (Vintage International): Morrison, Toni, Jones, Tayari: 9781400033423: Amazon.com: Books 

 From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century—a novel of sexual, racial, political, artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France.

“Brilliant and fiercely told.”—The New York Times

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. 

Purchase on Amazon:  Amazon.com: Another Country (Vintage International): 9780679744719: Baldwin, James: Books