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Browsing Black Writing
Through our commitment to publishing voices neglected by the mainstream, Serpent’s Tail has introduced many Black and Asian writers to a readership in the UK and worldwide. This section spans Harlem Renaissance classics from Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes, right up to the vibrant contemporary fiction of Shiromi Pinto and Jill Nelson - via a series of crime novels featuring a certain Easy Rawlins.
Highlights
Tea in the Harem
A housing estate in the Paris suburbs. Madjid is growing up caught between two cultures. At home, he listens to his mother's constant invective in Arabic as she attempts to make sense of her unfamilia... read more
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Banjo
Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseille waterfront as ‘Banjo’, passes his days panhandling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night Banjo, Malty, ... read more
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| Online Price | £7.99 |
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Six Easy Pieces
With the love of a good woman and two beautiful children, Easy Rawlins has put his past life of trading favors behind him. Following the loss of his best friend and sidekick, Mouse, he wants to set an... read more
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| Online Price | £7.99 |
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Multibuy : 3 for 2 |
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Selected Poems
For over 40 years, until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes captured in his poetry the lives of black people in the USA. Selected Poems is made up of Hughes' own choice of his poetry, published first ... read more
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| Online Price | £9.99 |
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Multibuy : 3 for 2 |
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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned
‘Socrates thought about a promise he’d made. He swore to himself that he’d never hurt another person...That way he could ease the evil deeds that he had perpetrated in the long evil life that he’d lived.’
Socrates Fortlow has spent 27 years in prison and can kill a man with his bare hands. But now he’s out and determined to use...
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Banana Bottom
In the early 1900s, Bita Plant returns to Jamaica after seven years of European education to live with Malcolm and Priscilla Craig – the white missionary benefactors who helped her become a cultivated young woman. They have Bita’s future mapped out: training at the mission and marrying a dedicated theological student. Reluctant to accept this f... read more
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Banjo
Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseille waterfront as ‘Banjo’, passes his days panhandling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music... read more
| Online Price | £7.99 |
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The Belly of the Atlantic
Salie lives in Paris. Back home on the Senegalese island of Niodior, her football-crazy brother, Madické, counts on her to get him to France, the promised land where foreign footballers become world famous. Given his illusions, how can Salie explain to him the grim reality of life as an immigrant?
The story of Salie and Madické highligh...
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Black Betty
Five years have passed since the White Butterfly Affair, there’s a Kennedy in the White House and Martin Luther King is in the news. It might look like a new dawn for Black America but for Easy Rawlins times are only getting tougher - his real-estate empire is deep in the hole. Trouble comes knocking once more when Easy’s asked to find a missin... read more
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Blue Light
From an unknown point in the universe, a blue light approaches our solar system. When it reaches Earth, it transforms those it strikes, causing them instantaneously to evolve beyond their present state of humanity. Blue Light is the story of these people and their transformation.
Narrated by Chance, a bi-racial man whose entire life has be...
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Corregidora
The blues singer Ursa is consumed by her hatred of Corregidora, the 19th-century slavemaster who fathered both her grandmother and mother. Made sterile in a violent fight with her husband Mutt, Ursa Corregidora is determined to seek revenge for the crimes of violent men. Her search for independence is stark and shocking.
Gayl Jones was sh...
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Daughters
Ursa Mackenzie is a black woman caught between two cultures — the USA and the Caribbean. Rejecting the lure of success, Ursa turns her back on a well-paid corporate research job and a stable, if loveless, relationship with a black academic. Instead, she seeks power and solace in her friendship with Viney. Remaining true to herself involves return... read more
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Devil in a Blue Dress
The time is 1948. The town is Los Angeles. The hero is Easy Rawlins, an out of work black war veteran. The mortgage payment’s coming due, so Easy accepts the assignment of finding Daphne Monet, blonde torch singer. In his search through a sleazy fearful city, he is lucky to be under the protection of the murderous Mouse...
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| Online Price | £7.99 |
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Finding Fish
Now a major motion picture starring and directed by Denzel Washington, Finding Fish is an amazing autobiography of Antwone Quenton Fisher who at the age of two was placed in a foster home in Cleveland, Ohio where he was treated with brutality and cruelty. His response to this treatment was to retreat into his own private world of paintings, poems a... read more
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Gone Fishin’
Houston, 1939. A nineteen-year-old Easy Rawlins and his friend, the dangerous Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander, are about to take the ride of a lifetime - into a mysterious bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge and death that will both change and link their destinies for ever.
The first book Walter Mosley wrote, Gone Fishin' introduces us to th...
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A Lesson Before Dying
In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, a young black man named Jefferson is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. The only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Gaines explores the deep prejudice of the American South in the tradition of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbi...
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The Man in My Basement
Charles Blakey is a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling. His parents are dead, he can't find a job, he drinks too much, and his friends have begun to desert him. Worst of all, he's fallen behind on the mortgage payments for the beautiful home that's belonged to his family for generations. When a stranger - a white man - offers him $50,00... read more
| Online Price | £7.99 |
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Selected Poems
For over 40 years, until his death in 1967, Langston Hughes captured in his poetry the lives of black people in the USA. Selected Poems is made up of Hughes' own choice of his poetry, published first in 1959.
It includes all of Hughes' best known poems including 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers', 'The Weary Blues', 'Song for Billie Holiday', 'B...
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| Online Price | £9.99 |
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Shadow of Light
‘Like the work of Richard Wright, Shadow of Light is in the tradition of black novels that become unforgettable’ Jerry W. Ward, Jr. read more
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Six Easy Pieces
With the love of a good woman and two beautiful children, Easy Rawlins has put his past life of trading favors behind him. Following the loss of his best friend and sidekick, Mouse, he wants to set an example for his children by earning an honest living. But trouble has a way of finding Easy on the mean streets of Watts.
Easy wanders from ...
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Tattoo
Pepe Carvalho, ex-cop, ex-marxist and constant gourmet, is working as a private detective in Barcelona, when a body is pulled out of the sea, its face so badly destroyed that the only way of identifying it is through a tattoo that says: ‘Born to raise hell in hell’.
A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to find out who the man is. Meanwh...
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Tea in the Harem
A housing estate in the Paris suburbs. Madjid is growing up caught between two cultures. At home, he listens to his mother's constant invective in Arabic as she attempts to make sense of her unfamiliar surroundings; at school, he tries to be part of French culture, a culture that rejects and insults Arabs.
In a direct language, punctuated...
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Walkin’ the Dog
Nine years after his release from prison, Socrates is still living in a two-room shack in Watts, now with a lover and a steady job. Having responsibilities and people he cares about makes acting morally even harder – he has so much more to lose with the police watching his every move.
Socrates Fortlow, first introduced in Always Outnumbe...
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| Online Price | £6.99 |
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