Although a classmate says that she cannot play Peter Pan in the school play because she is black, Grace discovers that she can do anything she sets her mind to do.

To come to terms with who she is and what she wants, Ailey, the daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, embarks on a journey through her family's past, helping her embrace her full heritage, which is the story of the Black experience in itself.

A man buys a mobile phone and starts receiving calls intended for someone else. After some initial hesitation, he begins to play with his new identity. From one day to the next, an actor's phone falls dead silent, as though someone had stolen his life. A writer takes a pair of trips with a woman whose worst fear is to end up in one of his works. A somewhat confused Internet blogger wants nothing more than to become a character in a novel. A detective-story...

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomaly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

"I have held you at night for ten years and I didn't even know your name. We have a child together. A dog, a house. Who are you? Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she'd do anything for them. But almost everything she's told them about herself is a lie. And she might just have got away with it, if it weren't for her husband's job. Leo is an obituary writer; Emma a well-known marine biologist. When she suffers a serious illness,...

A novel of a proud stranger in his native land. He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man...

"When we first meet Ruby, a Maetis woman in her 30s, she's a mess. She's angling to sleep with her therapist while also rekindling an old relationship with a man who was - let's just say - a mistake. As we will soon learn, however, Ruby's story is far broader and deeper than its rollicking, somewhat lighthearted first chapter. This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. Given up for adoption as an infant, Ruby was raised by...

The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours' drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another...

"Light-skinned Clare Kendry married a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage after deciding to 'pass' as a white woman. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, chose to remain within the African American community, and is both allured and repelled by Clare's racial masquerade. Clare's own interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for the identity she abandoned and can never regain, and forces her...

“BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION.” The headlines are all the same: Beloved mother and wife Delia Grinstead was last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing only a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To the best of her family’s knowledge, she has disappeared without a trace. But Delia didn’t disappear. She ran. Exhausted with her routine and everyone else’s plans for her,...