Martha Southgate

Three generations of African-American women--Tamara, her mother Angela, and her grandmother Mildred--find their lives and destinies linked across time by the power and influence of the movies, from the 1920s to the present day. 30,000 first printing

Third Girl from the Left

The only African-American faculty member of an exclusive New England boys' boarding school, Jerome Washington spends his life isolated from his peers and students, until the arrival of Rashid Bryson, a bright, young African-American student.

A Novel

The Fall of Rome

Fourteen-year-old 03Vicki Harris's dream has come true. She has been accepted into the summer program at New York City's prestigious School of American Ballet. It will be hard work and highly competitive. But Vicki feels ready. She is totally committed to dancing. Vicki isn't prepared to be one of only two African American students in the program. Nor is she expecting the racism she finds within the school. And Michael, from Harlem, takes Vicki completely by surprise. He shakes up her dream world -- where Baryshnikov is her idol, her parents never really got divorced, and every pirouette is perfect -- and shows her that the real world is bigger than a stage.

Another Way to Dance

Award-winning novelist Martha Southgate (who, in the words of Julia Glass, “can write fat and hot, then lush and tender, then just plain truthful and burning with heart”) now tells the story of a family pushed to its limits by addiction over the course of two generations. Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family back in landlocked Cleveland. Her adored brother, Tick, was her childhood ally as they watched their drinking father push away all the love that his wife and children were trying to give him. Now Tick himself has been coming apart and demands to be heard. Weaving four voices into a beautiful tapestry, Southgate charts the lives of the Hendersons from the parents’ first charmed meeting to Josie’s realization that the ways of the human heart are more complex than anything seen under a microscope.

The Taste of Salt

Three generations of African-American women--Tamara, her mother Angela, and her grandmother Mildred--find their lives and destinies linked across time by the power and influence of the movies, from the 1920s to the present day. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

The New York Times hailed Martha Southgate’s previous novel, The Fall of Rome, as “powerful,” O, the Oprah Magazine called it “quietly accomplished,” and Essence lauded it as “a bracingly honest look at race, class, and self-acceptance.” With Third Girl from the Left, Southgate brings her acute vision and emotional scope to a larger canvas. This enormously entertaining yet serious novel tells a story of African-American women struggling against all odds to express what lies deepest in their hearts. Like Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, it ranges freely through time, fact, and fiction to weave an enthralling story about history and art and their place in the lives of three women. “My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them to change a life, to change her life.” So explains Tamara, daughter of Angela, granddaughter of Mildred — the three women whose lives are portrayed in stunning detail in this ambitious novel spanning three generations of one family. Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1970 is not a place a smart black girl wants to linger. For Angela, twenty years old and beautiful, the stifling conformity is unbearable. She heads to Los Angeles just as blaxploitation movies are pouring money into the studios and lands a few bit parts before an unplanned pregnancy derails her plans for stardom. For Mildred, movies have always been a blessed diversion in a life marked by the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race riots. But after Angela leaves Tulsa following a bitter fight, the distance between them grows into a breach that remains for years. It falls to Tamara, a budding documentarian — raised in LA by Angela as though they have no family, no history — to help mother and grandmother confront all that has been silenced and left unsaid in their lives. A bold, beautifully written, and deeply involving novel, Third Girl from the Left deftly examines the pull of the movies, the power of desire, and the bonds of family in a quintessentially American story.

Martha Southgate

About

Books

Join the club