11 Books Published by Soho Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Seventeen-year-old honors student Coretta White’s Tumblr, Little White Lies—her witty thoughts on pretty much…everything—has gone viral. She’s got hundreds of thousands of followers; she’s even been offered a TV deal. But Coretta has a secret. She hasn’t been writing all her own posts. Stressed from the demands of the sudden attention, she hired an expert ghostwriter, forty-one-year-old Karl Ristoff, to keep the Tumblr going. Now consumed with guilt, she confesses.

Almost instantly, she suffers a public humiliation. The TV deal disappears. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. Then Karl is thrust into the limelight, only to suffer a dramatic fall himself. Together, they vow to find out who is responsible for ruining both of their lives, and why. But in order to exact justice and a wicked revenge, they must first come clean with each other.

The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat’s groundbreaking debut, now an established classic—revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

It is 1937 and Amabelle Désir, a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic, has built herself a life as the servant and companion of the wife of a wealthy colonel. She and Sebastien, a cane worker, are deeply in love and plan to marry. But Amabelle’s  world collapses when a wave of genocidal violence, driven by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, leads to the slaughter of Haitian workers. Amabelle and Sebastien are separated, and she desperately flees the tide of violence for a Haiti she barely remembers.

Already acknowledged as a classic, this harrowing story of love and survival—from one of the most important voices of her generation—is an unforgettable memorial to the victims of the Parsley Massacre and a testimony to the power of human memory.

Rozelle Quinn is so fair-skinned that she can pass for white. Her ten children are mostly light, too. They constitute the only world she rules and controls. Her power over them is all she has in an otherwise cruel and uncaring universe.

Rozelle favors her light-skinned kids, but Tangy Mae, 13, her darkest-complected child, is the brightest. She desperately wants to continue with her education. Her mother, however, has other plans. Rozelle wants her daughter to work cleaning houses for whites, like she does, and accompany her to the “Farmhouse,” where Rozelle earns extra money bedding men. Tangy Mae, she’s decided, is of age.

This is the story from an era when life’s possibilities for an African-American were unimaginably different.


From the Hardcover edition.

"People start calling me Night from small ’cause I was so dark… ". So the heroine of this evocative novel introduces herself to the tourist Amanda. But Amanda is not just on vacation. Nor is Night just a simple island girl. Their chance meeting changes both their lives. SONG OF NIGHT is a woman’s tale of love and rage, set on the island of Barbados.

Women of Jamaica with magical bonds to the worlds of Nature and spirits and to each other. Using a series of voices, Marcia Douglas, a poet, evokes Jamaica’s past as well as its present. The story is introduced by Bella, a Kin-Owla shape-shifterwho was there when God created Jamaica and laughed when She saw what She had done. Through the generations, Bella lives on, in one incarnation then another, always meeting suffering with fortitude, hiding the burden of her strange nature from others. The women whose lives cross hers include Ida, now an inmate of the Garden (once a British fortress, now the asylum for troubled old women), whose hardship-filled years have been redeemed by the magical calabash long ago bestowed upon her by the Rolling Calf boy; and Claudia, an educated woman who comes to the Garden hoping to find the mother who abandoned her as an infant. There is Muriel, who ventures to New York City in search of a better life, and Andrea, the friend she makes there who is also from Jamaica. There is young Gracie, who seeks comfort for the pain of being left behind by her mother, Muriel. And then there is Mrs. Cummings, who teaches Gracie about the plants in her garden and sends her to look for the white starflower that grows on the bush known as Madam Fate.

In five sections—Childhood, Migration, Half/First Generation, Return, and Future—the thirty-three contributors to this anthology write movingly, often hauntingly, of their lives in Haiti and the United States. Their dyaspora, much like a butterfly’s fluctuating path, is a shifting landscape in which there is much travel between two worlds, between their place of origin and their adopted land.

This compilation of essays and poetry brings together Haitian-Americans of different generations and backgrounds, linking the voices for whom English is a first language and others whose dreams will always be in French and Krey�l. Community activists, scholars, visual artists and filmmakers join renowned journalists, poets, novelists and memoirists to produce a poignant portrayal of lives in transition.

Edwidge Danticat, in her powerful introduction, pays tribute to Jean Dominique, a sometime participant in the Haitian dyaspora and a recent martyr to Haiti’s troubled politics, and the many members of the dyaspora who refused to be silenced. Their stories confidently and passionately illustrate the joys and heartaches, hopes and aspirations of a relatively new group of immigrants belonging to two countries that have each at times maligned and embraced them.

Maryse was the eighth child in her family, an unexpected one. Her father, a civil servant, had been awarded the Legion d’honneur; her elegant mother had been a schoolteacher. She arrived after a difficult pregnancy while the town of La Pointe, Guadeloupe was in the midst of celebrating Mardi Gras. She was raised to appreciate culture, the opera, the great French paintings and was sent to a privately-run school. Hers was a proud family in which appearances, skin tone, language, and class was important, her parents ever mindful of being a part of a world which for centuries had been reserved for Whites only.

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Maryse Condé vividly evokes the relationships and events which gave her childhood meaning: discovering her parents feelings of alienation; her first crush and short-lived romance; a falling out with her best friend over a frank assessment of her beauty; the death of her beloved grandmother when she was nine; an incident at a playground that was her first encounter with racism.

Maryse began to invent a universe of her own at an early age, and these gem-like vignettes capture the spirit of her fiction: haunting, powerful, poignant, and leavened with a streak of humor. They paint a wonderful picture of a little girl trying to find her place in the world, one that is redolent of the music and colors of the Caribbean, as well as of the harsher climate of Paris.

Tales from the Heart was awarded the Prix Yourcenar in 1999 for excellence in French writing by an author who resides in the United States.

Secrets et mensonges, est-ce le seul héritage que sa grand-mère, Nina, et sa mère, Reynalda, vont léguer à la narratrice ? Trois femmes, trois générations séparées bien qu’unies par le sang. Enfant abandonnée, Marie-Noëlle grandit à la Désirade, jusqu’au jour où sa mère l’a fait venir en France. Mère inconnue, terre inconnue. À Savigny-sur-Orge, elle se morfond dans une cité, sans jamais trouver sa place dans cette famille, pourtant la sienne. Commence alors pour elle une douloureuse quête sur la vérité de sa naissance.Elle interroge Nina et Reynalda. Leurs aveux sont affabulés, leurs demi-vérités ajoutent au mystère, ni l’une ni l’autre n’est disposée à livrer son histoire vraie.Si déguisées soit-elle, ces confidences font apparaître des femmes libres à tout prix, en lutte contre un destin qui veut les clouer : maternités non désirées, hommes non choisis, traditions frelatées d’un pays en rupture d’histoire. Long chemin, longue peine avant que, revenue à la Désirade, Marie-Noëlle ne conclut à la vanité des hantises familiales. Et vivre devient alors sa seule vérité.À travers de puissantes figures romanesques, c’est toute l’histoire des Antilles modernes qui se déploie ici, dans une langue qui associe la concision des grands Anglo-Saxons à la verve enchantée du créole.

A retelling of Bront’s Wuthering Heights set in nineteenth-century Guadeloupe and Cuba. Prize-winning Caribbean novelist Maryse Cond reimagines Emily Bront’s passionate novel as a tale of obsessive love between the "African" Rayze and Cathy, the mulatto daughter of the man who takes Rayze in and raises him, but whose treatment goads Rayze into rebellious flight. In Cuba, Rayze makes his fortune, but upon his return he discovers Cathy has wed the weak scion of a socially prominent Creole family. Rayze determines to be avenged for the loss of his love. His vengeance continues into the next generation, haunting both Cathy’s daughter and his son. In characteristic lush prose, Cond transposes Wuthering Heights to her native island of Guadeloupe, retaining the emotional power of the original while showing us Caribbean society in the wake of emancipation. First published in 1998 by Faber U.K. in Caryl Phillips’s prestigious Caribbean series, Windward Heights is making its first appearance in the United States.

A new arrival on a Caribbean island dominated by the cane fields, fifteen-year-old Midra falls under the spell of the island prince, whose African ancestry brings Midra a revelation from the ancient past. A first novel.