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Weekend 📚 Mail
4/12 release dates
📚 Love Me As I Am ~ Garcelle Beauvis Amistad
📚 Take My Hand~ Dolen Perkins-Valdez Berkley Publishing Group
📚 A Woman of Endurance ~ Dhalma Llanos-Figueroa. Amistad
4/19 release date
📚 The Memory Librarian: And other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae. Harper Voyager
5/3 release date
📚 Seen & Unseen ~ Marc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster. Atria Books
8/9 release date
📚 Therapy Isn’t Just For White People by Kiara Imani. Lit Riot Press, LLC
Who says your book club has to read big doorstop novels? Laurie Muchnick recommends some new works of short fiction that will yield great book club discussions.
https://bit.ly/3tLbUmm Alfred A. Knopf Tin House Catapult Amistad Scribner Books Random House
Book 📚 Mail. Released 3/15/2022
Author~ Sheila J Williams
Publisher Amistad
🖊 The author of The Secret Women tells the story of a brave and enduring woman as indomitable as Ernest Gaines’ legendary Miss Jane Pittman, in a breathtaking novel that combines the epic romance and adventure of Outlander, the sweeping drama of Roots, and the haunting historical power of Barracoon.
Things Past Telling is a remarkable historical epic that charts one unforgettable woman’s journey across an ocean of years as vast as the Atlantic that will forever separate her from her homeland.
Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace—a.k.a “Momma Grace” will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be “gifted” various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirate’s ward, acting as both a spy and a translator.
Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman, whose “craft” combines curated techniques and medicines from African, Indigenous, and European women. Those midwifery skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she walks the razor’s edge trying to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of the slave holders, who view infants born in bo***ge not as flesh-and-blood children but as investment property.
Throughout her triumphant and tumultuous life Maryam gains and loses her homeland, her family, her culture, her husband, her lovers, and her children. Yet as the decades pass, this tenacious woman never loses her sense of self.
Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the author’s real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-eighteen-century to the end of America’s Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River, Things Past Telling is a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the best—and worst—of our humanity.
Have you pre-ordered #LoveMeAsIAm yet?! If so, you can download the first chapter of my audiobook for free:
https://bit.ly/LMAIAaudio 🧡🦋 Amistad
Let's hang out! So excited to be hosting a talkshoplive on Wednesday, 3/16 at 8pm ET to sign copies of #LoveMeAsIAm and have a little Q&A. Get your autographed copy and join me live next week:
https://bit.ly/GBtsl! 🦋 Amistad
🎧 New Podcast Episode
Editors Unedited: Patrik Bass interviews Dahlma Llanos Figueroa, author of A WOMAN OF ENDURANCE
On this episode of The Library Love Fest Podcast, Patrik Bass, Executive Editor at Amistad, interviews Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, author of A WOMAN OF ENDURANCE. Combining the haunting power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative atmosphere of Philippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves.
Amistad
https://soundcloud.com/librarylovefest/editors-unedited-patrik-bass-interviews-dahlma-llanos-figueroa-author-of-a-woman-of-endurance
Forthcoming 📚 8~30~2022
Publisher ~ Amistad
🖊 Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful messages touch your soul.
#ICYMI This week 'The Great Mrs. Elias' by Barbara Chase-Riboud went onsale!
Listen to this suspenseful and mesmerizing novel full of early 1900s atmosphere, read by Robin Miles:
https://bit.ly/3uIyjBH
HarperCollins Amistad