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When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.

But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.

A searing tale of a young woman re-discovering her troubled family history and finding herself in the process.

In post-World War II England, 17-year-old Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour knows nothing of her family origins, and little of their history – or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. But Dottie knows what her family means to her, and in the wake of her mother’s death, she’s determined to keep the family together. She takes responsibility for her younger siblings, Sophie and Hudson.

But as Sophie drifts from man to man, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into a world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Feeling rootless in England, she seeks a space for herself and an identity through books and begins to clear a path through life. Gradually, Dottie gathers the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.

For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith, Dottie is a deeply compassionate portrait of a second generation immigrant, a masterful examination of poverty and racism, and a psychologically nuanced story of family and survival.