Ernest J Gaines

"In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s." "A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

Phillip Martin was a powerful man in the small urban community of St. Adrienne. The minister, a handsome darkbrown-skinned man, just over six feet tall, cut an imposing figure in the pulpit and in his position as leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the parish. When the long-barred doors on his former life begin to strain, his guilty past bursts forth, sending Martin into an emotional whirlwind that threatens to destroy his family, his parish and...

Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of ten years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex,...

"About a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order"--

The story of the life an African American woman from Louisiana, from the time of her childhood as a slave in the pre-Civil War South to 1962, when she witnesses the birth of the civil rights movement at the age of one hundred and ten.