When Silas House made his debut with Clay's Quilt last year, it touched a nerve not just in his home state (where it quickly became a bestseller), but all across the country. Glowing reviews-from USA Today (House is letter-perfect with his first novel), to the Philadelphia Inquirer (Compelling. . . . House knows what's important and reminds us of the value of family and home, love and loyalty), to the Mobile Register (Poetic, haunting), and everywhere...

"Russell's Knob is not paradise. But already in 1849 this New Jersey highlands settlement is home to a diverse population of blacks, whites, and reds who have intermarried and lived in relative harmony for generations. It is a haven for Dossie Bird, who has escaped north along the Underground Railroad and now feels the embrace of the Smoot family. Duncan Smoot presides as accidental patriarch, protector of his enterprising sister, Hattie, and his...

From the massively talented Gish Jen comes a barbed, moving, and stylistically dazzling new novel about the elusive nature of kinship. The Wongs describe themselves as a "half half" family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie's Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie's WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member. Her name...

"The sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the universe. When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old world"--Page [4] of cover (volume one).

Jeffrey Lent's astonishing debut novel, In the Fall, is already creating a sensation. It has been chosen as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, preempted for paperback for six figures, and acquired by leading publishers around the world. In the Fall is the extraordinary epic of three generations of an American family, the dark secrets that blister at its core, and the forbidden, transcendent love affairs that fuel its members over the...

The story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple, whose challenge of their anti-miscegenation arrest for their marriage in Virginia led to a legal battle that would end at the US Supreme Court.

The story of an American-Chinese family separated by the communist revolution in China, as they struggle to overcome difficulties and the prejudices a family of mixed blood must face. The half-Chinese husband remains behind in China, while the mother and teenage son go back to the mother's original home state of Vermont. The anxious wife awaits word from her husband, as the young mixed-race son falls in love with an American girl. The mother breaks...

"9 March 1876. My name is Meggie Kelly and I take up this pencil with my twin sister, Susie. We have nothing left, less than nothing. The village of our People has been destroyed. Empty of human feeling, half-dead ourselves, all that remains of us intact are hearts turned to stone. We curse the U.S. government, we curse the Army, we curse the savagery of mankind, white and Indian alike. We curse God in his heaven. Do not underestimate the power of...

"In 1873, a Cheyenne chief offers President Grant an exchange of one thousand horses for one thousand white women, who he intends to marry with his warriors and create a lasting peace. These women, "recruited" in penitentiaries and asylums, gradually integrate into the way of life of the Cheyenne. After the battle of Little Big Horn, some female survivors decide to take up arms against the United States. This ghost tribe of rebellious women will soon...

This book explores changing American views of race mixing in the twentieth century, showing how new scientific ideas transformed accepted notions of race and how those ideas played out on college campuses in the 1960s. In the 1930s, it was not unusual for medical experts to caution against miscegenation, or race mixing, espousing the common opinion that it would produce biologically dysfunctional offspring. By the 1960s, the scientific community...