Vaughn Johseph

Discover Albert French's haunting first novel; a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking.

The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression.

There are few figures and leaders of recent American history of greater social and political consequence than Jesse Jackson.

In the 1960s, Jackson served as a close aide to Dr. Martin Luther King - he was there on the day of his assassination, and continued his political legacy, inspiring a generation of Black and Latino politicians and activists, founding the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, and helping to make the Democratic Party more multicultural and progressive with his historic runs for the presidency in the 1980s.

In I Am Somebody, David Masciotra argues that Jackson's legacy must be rehabilitated in the history of American politics. Masciotra has had personal access to Jackson for several years, conducting over one hundred interviews with the man himself, as well as interviews with a wide variety of elected officials and activists who Jackson has inspired and influenced.

In 1945, when Congress began reviewing the record of the most conspicuous acts of courage by American soldiers during World War II, they recommended awarding the Medal of Honor to 432 recipients. Despite the fact that more than one million African-Americans served, not a single black soldier received the Medal of Honor.

The omission remained on the record for over four decades. But recent historical investigations have brought to light some of the extraordinary acts of valor performed by black soldiers during the war. Ultimately, in 1993 a US Army commission determined that seven men had been denied the Army's highest award simply due to racial discrimination.

In 1997, more than 50 years after the war, President Clinton finally awarded the Medal of Honor to these seven heroes, sadly all but one of them posthumously. These are their stories.

It's 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.

Finding herself on the run with Jones across America's Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. Her story will reveal how scores of lives - an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more - are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.

Spanning continents, centuries, and dimensions, this exquisitely crafted and madly inventive novel - a triple-disk, concept-album of an audiobook - is a profound yet propulsive enquiry into the nature of reality - the perfect immersive listen for fans of David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood.