Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, this work explores with humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties.

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.

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life.

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.

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.

Deals with a range of topics: friendship, love, war, three cultures, three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and, the tricky way the past has of coming back.

Huckleberry Finn had a tough life with his drunk father until an adventure with Tom Sawyer changed everything. But when Huck's dad returns and kidnaps him, he must escape down the Mississippi river with runaway slave, Jim. They encounter trouble at every turn, from floods and gunfights to armed bandits and the long arm of the law.

Set in New England mainly and London partly, this work concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps, and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some questions about what life does to love.

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.

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.

Sue Monk Kidd's exquisite first novel has received huge acclaim. 'Wonderfully written, powerful, poignant, and humorous... Do read it' Joanna Trollope

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.

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

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

Here, Tatum asserts that we do not know how to talk about our racial differences. Using real-life examples and research, she presents evidence that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about facilitating communication across racial and ethnic divides.

Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule, this work analyses the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. Showing how decolonization must be combined with building a national culture, it presents analysis of relations between the West and the Third World.

Sounds a clarion warning to the world.

Tells the story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. This work talks about love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

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.