RECKONINGS & RETURNING HOME – FICTION

In DONNA HEMANS’ The House of Plain Truth, Pearline receives news about her ailing father and travels to her native Jamaica. After a tense reunion with her sisters and her father’s startling deathbed wish – that she repair their fractured family legacy and find three long-lost siblings – she learns what she must sacrifice in her attempt to find home. In WANDA M. MORRIS’ What You Leave Behind: A Novel, attorney Deena Wood’s life has fallen apart after losing her mother, her marriage, and her job. While looking for a fresh start in her childhood home, what starts as a bit of snooping reveals a deadly scheme of illegal land grabs in poor and rural communities. And in JOHN VERCHER’s Devil Is Fine: A Novel, the book’s biracial narrator, still reeling from a sudden tragedy, learns he’s inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He intends to sell and move on – but then discovers that he is, in fact, a Black owner of a former plantation.