In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author…“Remember Getting to Happy, Waiting to Exhale, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back? Well, you won’t likely forget Terry McMillan’s Who Asked You? either” (Raleigh News & Observer).
Betty Jean already has her hands full when her grown daughter leaves her two young sons in her care. In between dealing with her other...

After Othella--the daughter of the town tramp in Shreveport, Louisiana--convinces her to give her baby away, fifteen-year-old Ruby Jean Upshaw runs away to New Orleans, where nothing can quell her simmering rage at Othella for persuading her to let her baby go.

Now in paperback comes the intoxicating debut novel of "one motherless daughter's discover of ... the strange and wondrous places we find love" ("The Washington Post"). Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing work is set in South Carolina in 1964.

"Raised in Pennsylvania, Zinzi Clemmons's heroine Thandi views the world of her mother's childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor--someone, or something, to love"--

Traces the lives of two African-American heroines from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, to their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

In WAITING TO EXHALE, Terry McMillan chronicled the lives and love affairs of women in their mid-thirties, opening up an entirely new literary field and audience for African-American writers. GETTING TO HAPPY, her exuberant and engaging "sequel," revisits the same four spirited women - Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin - now catapulted into midlife.Fifteen years later, her heroines are as sassy, vivid, and smart-mouthed as ever. As a broadcast...