July-August LIT Picks: Society Pages

"A fierce and illuminating debut" (frictionbooks.com) from Jael Richardson, the Ontario-based founder of FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity), Gutter Child (2021) reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. As a modern heroine in an altered but all-too-recognizable reality, Richardson's Elimina must find the strength within herself to forge her future in defiance of a system that tries to shape her destiny. July Selection. Join the Club

In her final novel, “a beautiful and devastating examination of family, society and race”(The New York Times), Dorothy West offers an intimate glimpse into the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast’s Black bourgeoisie on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s. With elegant, luminous prose, Dorothy West crowns her literary career by illustrating one family’s struggle to break the shackles of race and class. August Selection. Join the Club