Forging inseparable bonds in childhood that reinforce them throughout their teen years, two girls and three boys go their separate ways as adults and encounter respective tragedies and transformations.

"A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life. Every family has its own mythology, but in this family none of the myths match up. Claudia's mother says she met her husband when she stopped him from jumping off a bridge. Her father says it happened when he saved her from an attempted robbery. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different; they can't even agree on how they met, much less who needed saving. Into this unlikely...

"This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married...

An award-winning novelist's captivating look at postwar England and a summer that changes the lives of three schoolgirls on the brink of womanhood and a new world.

Iris Cooper has been singing ever since she can remember, hitting the high notes like no one else. When she is twelve, her father convinces the owner of a bar in Lake City, Texas, to let her perform, and she stuns the audience. In the ensuing years, never staying anywhere for long, father and daughter move from one dusty town to the next, her passion for music growing every time she takes the mike in another roadhouse. But it is not an easy life for...

When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War, eleven-year-old Roland Baines is stranded at a boarding school. His vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Twenty-five years later, Roland's wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he confronts the reality of his rootless existence. Seeking...

"A new, beautifully illustrated translation of Felix Salten's celebrated novel Bambi--the original source of the beloved story. Most of us think we know the story of Bambi--but do we? The Original Bambi is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers' images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film--an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature's...

Four high school yearbook-committee members struggle to understand and appropriately document a horrific school shooting in a suburban St. Louis town that is also being terrorized by mysterious house fires at the homes of the victims.

Growing up in early twentieth-century Illinois, Ruby Drake is a happy child. But one winter's night, her beloved parents perish in an accident and suddenly Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world. Her new path eventually takes her to Harvester, Minnesota, where she finds work on the farm of the Schoonovers, who soon become a second family to her. Ruby falls in love with Roland, a married neighbor. When Ruby is asked to care for...

"In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is...