Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

* Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece is perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

The classic, Pulitzer-Prize winning novel that made Alice Walker a household name.

Ralph Ellison's impassioned first novel, winner of the prestigious American National Book Award, tells the story of an invisible man simply because people refuse to see me . Yet his powerfully depicted adventures go far beyond the story of one man.

* One of America's most important classics, the first and best loved volume of Maya Angelou's bestselling six-volume autobiography is reissued in a new look to coincide with the publication of Celebrations

The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.

This is the story of Macon Milkman Dead, heir to the richest black family in a Midwestern town, as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spiritually. Through the enlightenment of one man, the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. He became identified in the white press as a teacher of race hatred. This autobiography reveals his integrity and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.

Follows Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman's death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime.

A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.

As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she'd simply say 'I'm light-skinned'. This is James McBride's tribute to his remarkable, eccentric, determined mother, and an exploration of what family and the colour of your skin really means.

At four years of age, Richard Wright set fire to his home; at five his father deserted the family; by six Richard was - temporarily - an alcoholic. It was in saloons, railroad yards and streets that he learned the facts about life under white subjection, about fear, hunger and hatred. Gradually he learned to play Jim Crow in order to survive.

Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the new world, who held the key to Haley's past.

Presents a semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

Bud (like a plant, not short for Buddy , as he tells everyone) is a motherless boy on the run. He's determined to find his father but doesn't know where to start. The only clue he has is a bunch of flyers about Herman E Calloway and his jazz band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression.

The theme of this novel is the anatomy of an internecine war, cultural, religious and racial. It is waged between a community of nuns and the strays and misfits who arrive at their convent for safe haven, and those who dwell in the surrounding black township in Oklahoma.

Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature.

'A romance of the last 500,000 years' from the Pulitzer prize winning author of THE COLOR PURPLE.

It is 1926 and winter grips Harlem. Joe Trace shoots to death his lover, the impetuous 18-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral his determined, hardworking wife Violet tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife. Their story captures the complex humanity of black American urban life at that time.

In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a black chauffer, dreams of a better life, and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. But his mother uses the money to buy a house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them out.