Colson Whitehead

New York City, 1971. Furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down, his business up and his life straight. When he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May, he hits up Munson, an old police contact. But Munson has his own favours to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. Pepper - seasoned crook, and Carney's partner in crime takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot and finds himself in a world of Hollywood stars and celebrity drug dealers, along with the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters and hit men.

1976. When a fire seriously injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it, navigating a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent and the utterly corrupted.

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell, and when Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. But matters do not go as planned and although they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.