Mignon Samuels Trilogy

A modern classic-bold, intimate, and unapologetically honest. In REACHING BACK, award-winning author Nea Anna Simone introduces readers to Mignon Samuels and begins a powerful multigenerational saga that explores identity, inheritance, and the enduring strength of Black womanhood. This first novel in the Mignon Samuels Trilogy lays the emotional and narrative foundation for a story that unfolds across three books, tracing legacy, reckoning, and transformation. When Mignon Samuels discovers an aging leather-bound journal, she is drawn into the hidden lives of four generations of women who came before her-from her great-grandmother's resilience to her mother's unspoken sacrifices. As the journal reveals long-buried truths, Mignon begins to see how patterns of silence, survival, and compromise have shaped her own life. At the same time, Mignon is confronting the unraveling of her marriage and the collapse of the life she believed she was meant to live. Pulled between who she has been and who she is becoming, she must face difficult truths about love, loyalty, and self-belonging. What begins as discovery becomes a reckoning-one that forces Mignon to question inherited expectations and consider the cost of breaking generational cycles. REACHING BACK is a fast-paced, emotionally rich novel about memory, identity, and the power of truth. Nea Anna Simone's prose is lyrical, raw, and deeply human, setting the stage for Mignon's continued journey in Reborn (Book Two) and The Substance of Things (Book Three). Ideal for readers of Terry McMillan, J. California Cooper, and Tayari Jones, REACHING BACK asks an enduring question: how much of the past do we carry-and what does it take to choose ourselves?

Five years after discovering the worn leather journal of the women who came before her, Mignon Samuels is finally ready to write her own story beside theirs. But when she turns the page on her family's past, she finds more than inspiration-she uncovers a truth that shatters everything she believes about who she is and where she comes from. Following the fragile thread of memory and ink, Mignon is pulled back to Nazi Germany, where forbidden love and a family marked as expendable must fight to survive the Holocaust. A child branded a disgrace, a family torn apart, and a desperate escape across borders become more than history lessons; they are the roots of the silence, fear, and fractures haunting Mignon's present. Out of that devastation emerges a man known only as The German-a figure shaped by war, ideology, and his own divided soul. His obsession and violence have cast a long shadow over Mignon's bloodline, touching each generation without their fully knowing why. As buried war crimes, family secrets, and modern betrayals collide, Mignon and her loved ones are forced to confront both the predator in their midst and the legacy of a world that once tried to erase them. REBORN is a gripping family saga of the Holocaust's long echo-a story of survival, identity, and the women determined to reclaim their lineage from the darkness of history and the monsters it created.