After ten years, Sheldon returns from New York City to Paris, Georgia. His mother Evelyn, a laundress who is stubborn, ornery, opinionated, mean-spirited, insulting, and inflexible, has sent a ten-year-old boy who says he’s Sheldon’s son up to see Sheldon. Sheldon comes home to straighten things out. Old arguments flare up – between mother and son and between brothers. Sheldon wants no part of fatherhood or family. Then, someone else from New York shows up at Evelyn’s door, bringing a new set of challenges. Will this family ever stop airing its dirty laundry? And what of Sheldon: where is his pride? Can he, in the words of James Baldwin, go where his blood beats and live the life he has?

Rwanda, 1973. In the prestigious catholic institute ‘Notre-Dame du Nil’, perched on a hill, young Rwandan girls study to become the elite of the country. In the process of graduating, they share the same dormitory, the same dreams, the same problems of teenage girls. But in every corner of the country as well as in the school there are deep antagonisms that will forever change the destiny of these young girls and the whole country.

Poland, 1945. Mathilde, a young French Red Cross doctor, is on a mission to help the war survivors. When a nun seeks for her help, she is brought to a convent where several pregnant sisters are hiding, unable to reconcile their faith with their pregnancy. Mathilde becomes their only hope.

Toddrick Frank, a hustler, living his life until he runs into his ex-girlfriend, Quanita’s baby daddy, Tyrone. Afraid for his life, Frank sets out to run out of town until he receives a call from Sage Lee to kill her husband for half a million.

In 1985, against the backdrop of Thatcherism, Brian Jackson enrolls in the University of Bristol, a scholarship boy from seaside Essex with a love of knowledge for its own sake and a childhood spent watching “University Challenge,” a college quiz show. At Bristol he tries out for the Challenge team and falls under the spell of Alice, a lovely blond with an extensive sexual past.

A dinner party with beef stew and much punch spirals out of control when the host couple are sucked into a bout of light-hearted arm wrestling.

Three friends united by their love of hip-hop work to make their big mark in the music industry. Beginning in the summer of 1990 NYC, Nikki a brilliant recent grad abandons a law school scholarship to pursue her dream of becoming a record exec along with the son of a legendary music producer boyfriend David who’s struggling at the city’s top R&B station. Dee Vee is an aspiring producer on the hunt to find the next big rapper on the come-up.

Bad Boy Bubby is just that: a bad boy. So bad, in fact, that his mother has kept him locked in their house for his entire thirty years, convincing him that the air outside is poisonous. After a visit from his estranged father, circumstances force Bubby into the waiting world, a place which is just as unusual to him as he is to the world.

Guy is an experienced British fighter pilot who is in command of Britain’s first manned mission to space. He has trained for this for three years at the height of the Cold War and now he is alone in space with a malfunctioning capsule. He has limited contact with the UK, some unusual communication with the US and some unorthodox communication with Roscosmos deep in Soviet Russia. Who will help him? Will he make the right choice?

A Mexican father’s prejudice slowly uncoils into a raging fury as his daughter falls in love with a young black poet.

An enigmatic outsider living on a remote Scottish island finds herself caught between her minister husband and the delinquent who is sent to live with them.

After spending two decades in England, Bill Bryson returns to the U.S., where he decides the best way to connect with his homeland is to hike the Appalachian Trail with one of his oldest friends.