With a new introduction by Robert Jones, Jr, author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets 'Gloria Naylor is a brilliant word-worker and a breathtaking story-teller. Mama Day is her masterpiece' Tayari Jones 'A sweeping, ambitious, gorgeous novel - takes you by the throat and refuses to let go. Mama Day is a stone-cold masterpiece' Carmen Maria Machado Between Georgia and South Carolina is an island you won't find on any map. Only a single wooden bridge connects it to the world. In Willow Springs people still honour their ancestors, who arrived as slaves back in the time of Sapphira Wade, the 'true conjure woman' who set them all free. It is said that Mama Day has inherited Sapphira's power. She is a healer whose hands have delivered almost every soul on the island - and rumour has it that she can summon lightning storms. When Cocoa, her great-niece, returns to Willow Springs from New York, she brings her husband, George. But can Mama Day save them from the island's darker powers? Mama Day is a powerful story of love, belonging, magic and inheritance. 'One of my favourite novels of all time. Naylor's skill in weaving together culture, heartbreak, joy, magic, terror, laughter, pain, and love - which is to say, life - is extraordinary' Robert Jones, Jr

Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home. Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the 'high life' for marriage with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class family to organize a tenant's union.

On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces. A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense.

In this landmark anthology -- the companion volume to Langston Hughes's 1967 classic, The Best Short Stories by Black Writers: 1899 - 1967 -- Gloria Naylor presents the finest African-American short stories of the last three decades. Arranged in four thematic sections -- "Remembering," "Affirming," "Revealing the Self Divided," and "Moving On" -- the thirty-seven stories included brilliantly capture the many facets of the black experience in America.

These distinguished authors are represented in Children of the Night

Maya Angelou
James Baldwin
Toni Cade Bambara
Edwidge Danticat
Samuel R. Delany
Alexis DeVeaux
Rita Dove
Ralph Ellison
Carolyn Ferrell
Thomas Glave
Jewelle Gomez
Howard Gordon
Sam Greenlee
Carolivia Herron
Kelvin Christopher James
Charles Johnson
Edward P. Jones
Randall Kenan
Jamaica Kincaid
Andrea Lee
Helen Elaine Lee
Clarence Major
Colleen McElroy
Terry McMillan
James Alan McPherson
Jess Mowry
Gloria Naylor
Diane Oliver
Ann Petry
Jewell Parker Rhodes
Ntozake Shange
Joyce Carol Thomas
Alice Walker
Michael Weaver
John Edgar Wideman
Sherley Anne Williams
Shay Youngblood

Also available from Little, Brown and Company: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers: 1899 - 1967, Edited and Introduced by Langston Hughes

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