Set in America in the 1680s, 'A Mercy' reveals what lies under the surface of slavery. At its heart, this is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter - a mother who cuts off her daughter, to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but 18 years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless.

It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.

It is 1926 and winter grips Harlem. Joe Trace shoots to death his lover, the impetuous 18-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral his determined, hardworking wife Violet tries to disfigure the corpse with a knife. Their story captures the complex humanity of black American urban life at that time.

The chronicle of the tragic lives of a poor black family in 1940s America. Every night Pecola, unlovely and unloved, prays for blue eyes like those of her white schoolfellows. She becomes the focus of the mingled love and hatred engendered by her family's frailty and the world's cruelty.

A novel set in a small town in Ohio, focusing on two girls, Nell and Sula, both black, both poor, who share their dreams until Sula escapes to live a vagrant city life for ten years. When she returns, the bond of their friendship is broken.

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. For Sethe, Paul D. Halle and the others, the benign imprisonment of Sweet Home is destroyed. By the Nobel Prize-winning author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby.

Jadine is a graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian, American black living in Paris and Rome. Son is a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous, an American black from small-town Florida. He is a threat to her freedom: she is a threat to his identity.

The theme of this novel is the anatomy of an internecine war, cultural, religious and racial. It is waged between a community of nuns and the strays and misfits who arrive at their convent for safe haven, and those who dwell in the surrounding black township in Oklahoma.

This is the story of Macon Dead as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spiritually. Through the enlightenment of one man, the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.