Item category 2: Black & Asian Interests

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the David Higham First Novel Award, this novel is set on a Virginian plantation, and tells the tragic story of a fiercely intelligent and rebellious young black slave who breaks all the rules.

A Whitbread Prize winner, this book is a study of good and evil. It begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Grace loves to act out stories. When her school decides to perform Peter Pan, Grace longs to play the lead, but her classmates point out that Peter was a boy, and besides, he wasn't black.

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 gh...

Join the ever popular Handa, a young African girl living in a Kenyan tribe, as she goes about her everyday life, delivering fruits to her village and hunting for her Grandma's black hen with her friend, Akeyo.

This is the extraordinary account of Alex Haley's own 12 year search for his family's origins. Tracing his ancestry through six generations he discovered a 16 year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past. Tracing his ancestry through six gen...

Henry Morton Stanley was a cruel imperialist, who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo - or so we think. But as Tim Jeal shows, this perception is not true. Now, abundant new documentary evidence allows Jeal to show just how misunderstood Sta...

Venetian entrepreneur and explorer Niccolò Zuliani takes up the position as bodyguard to Friar Alberoni on a journey to the court of the Mongol overlord Kubilai Khan. He soon regrets his decision, however, when he becomes embroiled in solving the murder of the man Alberoni was seeking.

This is the story of love, commitment and the flowering of the human spirit against the background of South Africa's apartheid. Frightened that their baby sister Dineo will die, 13-year-old Naledi and her younger brother Tiro run away from their grandmother to Johannesburg to find their mother, w...