Bücher von Sadeqa Johnson

'Luminous and moving!' Kate Quinn'Unforgettable' Kristen HarmelPhiladelphia, 1948: Fifteen-year-old Ruby's dreams are almost within reach. She's going to be the first in her family to attend college, despite having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising her only daughter. But falling madly in love with the one boy she is forbidden from threatens to pull Ruby back into poverty and desperation. When she's imprisoned in a home for unwed mothers - locked in the House of Eve with other 'fallen girls' - everything she's worked so hard for starts slipping through her fingers.Washington, DC, 1948: Eleanor arrives in the city with ambition, hope and a past she's trying her hardest to run from. When she meets William at Howard University, with his inky black eyes and broad shoulders, it's love at first sight. But William hails from one of Washington, DC's elite Black families, who don't let just anyone into their inner circle - especially not a girl from 'the wrong side of the tracks'. Eleanor hopes that a baby will mean they finally accept her, and that her secrets won't see the light of day - but fate has other plans in store...In the dawn of the 1950s, Ruby and Eleanor are complete strangers - until their paths unexpectedly collide. Forced to make the most heartbreaking decisions of their lives, will their choices save them... or be their undoing?

From the New York Times bestselling author of House of Eve—a 2023 Reese’s Book Club Pick! *A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Christian Science Monitor* Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this “fully immersive” (Lisa Wingate, #1 bestselling author of Before We Were Yours) story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.