Wasatch County Library

Untold numbers of black men and women in America have achieved great things against the odds. In this insightful book, award-winning author Tonya Bolden commemorates the lives of sixteen black individuals who dared to dream, take risks, and chart courses to success. They were pathfinders. In these pages you will meet Venture Smith, an African man who was enslaved in America but later bought his own freedom; Richard Potter, a magician whose methods...

"One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation." -Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili...

Shahryar, a recent Ph. D. graduate and father of nine-year-old Anna, must leave the US when his visa expires. As father and daughter spend their last remaining weeks together, Shahryar tells Anna the history of his country, beginning in a village on the Bay of Bengal, where a poor fisherman and his Hindu wife, who converted to Islam out of love for him, are preparing to face a storm of historic proportions. Their story intersects with those of a Japanese...

In the first book of the Mountain Song Legacy series readers step into a small Kentucky coal mining town in the late 1800's where hope is found in the hearts of two young girls-the vibrant, red-headed Maggie MacAuley and her fragile friend Summer Rankin. When Jonathan Stuart, the latest in a succession of educators, actually wants to continue teaching in the one-room schoolhouse, then Maggie and Summer know that he is special. So when Jonathan's...

"A picture book biography of Dr. William Key, a former slave and self-trained veterinarian who taught his horse, Jim, to read and write and who together with Jim became one of the most famous traveling performance acts around the turn of the twentieth century. Includes afterword and author's sources"--

"A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In "Who Will Greet You at Home," a National Magazine Award finalist forThe New Yorker, A woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild," a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground....

The summer of 1917 should have been a summer like any other. Stephen Robbins should have been doing the same thing he'd been doing for years past. As a young boy he'd fled his life in a secluded mountain cove and risen through the ranks to become the manager of the South's finest resort, the elegant Mountain Park Hotel. By all rights, he should have spent this summer as host to some of the wealthiest gentry on the East Coast. Hans Ruser, German Commodore...

A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison).
 
Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers...

Excerpt: "From the extreme West of the Indo-European world, we go this year to the extreme East. From the soft rain and green turf of Gaeldom, we seek the garish sun and arid soil of the Hindoo. In the Land of Ire, the belief in fairies, gnomes, ogres and monsters is all but dead; in the Land of Ind it still flourishes in all the vigour of animism. Soils and national characters differ; but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in...

"Isaiah Quintabe has, against many odds, built a proper life for himself: a respected detective in his hometown of East Long Beach, a well-kept home, a growing library, and even a rehabilitated horse-sized pit bull (courtesy of his previous client). But something is wrong: the death of his older brother nearly a decade ago has sent him down a dark path, one that he's never truly been able to escape. RIGHTEOUS is the story of Isaiah's investigation...