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News & Features » May 2016 » ONE-DAY SALE: Three Bernice L. McFadden NOOK Books for $1.99!

ONE-DAY SALE: Three Bernice L. McFadden NOOK Books for $1.99!

In celebration of the release of The Book of Harlan, the latest novel from Bernice L. McFadden, three of her critically acclaimed novels — Gathering of Waters, Glorious, and Loving Donovan — are available for only $1.99 each today as part of Barnes & Noble’s Nook Daily Find! Click the link for more information.

This sale is only good today, May 3, 2016 — don’t miss out!

Click here to get Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden for just $1.99!

A New York Times Notable Book of 2012
Finalist for a Phillis Wheatley Fiction Book Award
Finalist for a 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

“McFadden works a kind of miracle—not only do [her characters] retain their appealing humanity; their story eclipses the bonds of history to offer continuous surprises . . . Beautiful and evocative, Gathering of Waters brings three generations to life . . . The real power of the narrative lies in the richness and complexity of the characters. While they inhabit these pages they live, and they do so gloriously and messily and magically, so that we are at last sorry to see them go, and we sit with those small moments we had with them and worry over them, enchanted, until they become something like our own memories, dimmed by time, but alive with the ghosts of the past, and burning with spirits.”
—Jesmyn Ward, New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi—a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families.

Tass Hilson and Emmet Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit.

Forty years later, after the death of her husband, Tass returns to Money and fantasy takes flesh when Emmett Till’s spirit is finally released from the dank, dark waters of the Tallahatchie River. The two lovers are reunited, bringing the story to an enchanting and profound conclusion.

Gathering of Waters mines the truth about Money, Mississippi, as well as the town’s families, and threads their history over decades. The bare-bones realism—both disturbing and riveting—combined with a magical realm in which ghosts have the final say, is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Click here to get Glorious by Bernice L. McFadden for just $1.99!

Finalist for the 2011 NAACP Image Award for Fiction

“McFadden’s lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth. . . . McFadden has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.”
New York Times Book Review

Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era. Blending fact and fiction, Gloriousis the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and ultimately revival offers a candid and true portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.

It is a novel informed by the question that is the title of Langston Hughes’s famous poem: What happens to a dream deferred? Based on years of research, this heart-wrenching fictional account is given added resonance by factual events coupled with real and imagined larger-than-life characters. Glorious is an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.

Click here to get Loving Donovan by Bernice L. McFadden for just $1.99!

“Bernice L. McFadden is one of the best contemporary literary writers out there today . . . Her brilliance, her talent as a novelist, is the very life she breathes into all of her characters.”
—Terry McMillan, from the Introduction

“Bernice L. McFadden was one of the best writers to emerge in the post–Waiting to Exhale explosion that introduced at least a dozen Black female novelists. Loving Donovan has generated near-cult status among readers. After more than a decade since it appeared, Donovan is being reissued. How fitting that Terry McMillan has written a new introduction. If you’ve read Donovanbefore, you will fall in love all over again. And if this is your first time, prepare yourself for an intense romance between an enigmatic antihero and a heroine who will feel like your homegirl.”
Essence Magazine

The first section of McFadden’s unconventional love story belongs to Campbell. Despite being born to a brokenhearted mother and a faithless father, Campbell still believes in the power of love . . . if she can ever find it. Living in the same neighborhood, but unknown to Campbell until a chance meeting brings them together, is Donovan, the “little man” of a shattered home—a family torn apart by anger and bitterness.

In the face of daunting obstacles, Donovan dreams of someday marrying, raising a family, and playing in the NBA. But deep inside, Campbell and Donovan live with the histories that have shaped their lives. What they discover—together and apart—forms the basis of this compelling, sensual, and surprising novel.

Also available everywhere books are sold: The Book of Harlan, Bernice L. McFadden’s latest breathtaking novel.

BookofHarlan_current

NAACP Image Award finalist Bernice L. McFadden’s latest novel is a gorgeous, affecting epic of one musician’s rise and fall through Harlem, Occupied Paris, and beyond.

“Simply miraculous . . . As her saga becomes ever more spellbinding, so does the reader’s astonishment at the magic she creates. This is a story about the triumph of the human spirit over bigotry, intolerance and cruelty, and at the center of The Book of Harlanis the restorative force that is music.”
Washington Post

“McFadden packs a powerful punch with tight prose and short chapters that bear witness to key events in early twentieth-century history: both World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Great Migration. Partly set in the Jim Crow South, the novel succeeds in showing the prevalence of racism all across the country—whether implemented through institutionalized mechanisms or otherwise. Playing with themes of divine justice and the suffering of the righteous, McFadden presents a remarkably crisp portrait of one average man’s extraordinary bravery in the face of pure evil.”
Booklist, Starred review

Harlan’s tale begins in Macon, Georgia, in 1917, and readers follow him up north to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance; across the country as a traveling musician; and to Montmartre (the “Harlem of Paris”) as it falls under Nazi Occupation. From Montmartre, Harlan and Lizard—his best friend and fellow musician—are interned by the Nazis in Buchenwald concentration camp, with no hope of seeing their beloved Harlem again. In prose that is beautiful and affecting, McFadden once again stuns with a tale that is by turns mesmerizing and profoundly haunting.

Posted: May 3, 2016

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