A Harvest book

Claude McKay

In the bustling port city of Marseilles, an African-American banjo player known as Banjo drifts through the streets with a musician’s dream—hoping to form a band while surviving day to day amid shifting fortunes. Across a series of encounters and conversations, he and the other beach boys navigate the international currents of the docks, taking odd jobs and improvising their lives as opportunity and danger trade places. As romance and ambition flare and fade, the group’s fragile bonds begin to fracture, revealing how quickly community can dissolve when each person must choose a path for survival. Written with Claude McKay’s lyrical immediacy and Caryl Phillips’s keen attention to voice and displacement, this novel explores migration, labor, identity, and the restless hope that music can offer in a world built to move on without you.

John Lewis

Born the son of an Alabama sharecropper and later serving as a U.S. Congressman, John Lewis recounts a life lived at the center of the civil rights movement. From the early lunch counter sit-ins to the brutal turning point of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, his memoir traces the courage, strategy, and human cost behind the headlines. With vivid recollections of fellow leaders and the often messy realities of organizing—conflict, compromise, and hard-won solidarity—Lewis illuminates how nonviolent action was built, tested, and sustained. Written in a clear, reflective voice shaped by lived experience, this is both a personal journey and a powerful meditation on perseverance, justice, and the moral power of collective action.