Bernice L. McFadden Knihy

"Young and confident, with a swagger in her step, Sugar arrives in the small southern town of Bigelow with the hope of starting over. Soon Bigelow is alight with gossip and suspicion, and Sugar fears she can't hide from her past. Until, that is, she meets Pearl, her next-door neighbour. Over sweet-potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming both women's lives - and the life of an entire town. Vividly bringing 1950s Deep South America to life, with its flowering magnolia trees, lingering scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, and white picket fences that keep strangers out - but ignorance and superstition in, Sugar takes us on a journey through loss and suffering to a place of forgiveness, understanding, and grace."--Provided by publisher.

McFadden's incredible classic debut, SugarIn This Bitter Earth, Sugar Lacey is on her way out of Bigelow, Arkansas, where she'd come to break with the past.

A young woman must learn to love and trust again after experiencing the brutality of ritual servitude in West Africa.

During World War II, two African American musicians are captured by the Nazis in Paris and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp.The Book of Harlan opens with the courtship of Harlan’s parents and his 1917 birth in Macon, Georgia. After his prominent minister grandfather dies, Harlan and his parents move to Harlem, where he becomes a musician. Soon, Harlan and his best friend, trumpeter Lizard Robbins, are lured across the Atlantic Ocean to perform at a popular cabaret in the Parisian enclave of Montmartre—affectionately referred to as “The Harlem of Paris” by black American musicians.When the City of Light falls under Nazi occupation, Harlan and Lizard are thrown into Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp in Weimar, Germany. The experience irreparably changes the course of Harlan’s life. Based on exhaustive research and told in McFadden’s mesmeric prose, The Book of Harlan skillfully blends the stories of McFadden’s familial ancestors with those of real and imagined characters.