After a family tragedy, Jacob feels compelled to explore an abandoned orphanage on an island off the coast of Wales, discovering disturbing facts about the children who were kept there.

With his dying words, H---Jacob's final connection to his grandfather Abes's secret life--entrusts Jacob with a mission: Deliver newly contacted peculiar Noor Pradesh to an operative known as V.

In St. Louis, Missouri, in 1911, orphaned eleven-year-old Julia Delaney rails against countless disappointments and the nun's strict rules at the House of Mercy, especially after her sister Mary turns fourteen and must leave, but she, her family, and bestfriend get tangled up with a gangster and a decade-old mystery.

In all the years that Elinora Gassbeek has been matron of the Little Tulip Orphanage, not once have the Rules for Baby Abandonment been broken. Until the autumn of 1880, when five babies are left in outrageous circumstances; one in a tin toolbox, one in a coal bucket, one in a picnic hamper, one in a wheat sack, and finally, one in a coffin-shaped basket. Those babies were Lotta, Egg, Fenna, Sem, and Milou. And although their cruel matron might think...

"It's 1941, and tensions are rising in the United States as the Second World War rages in Europe. Eleven-year-old Gusta's life, like the world around her, is about to change. Her father, a foreign-born labor organizer, has had to flee the country, and Gusta has been sent to live in an orphanage run by her grandmother. Nearsighted, snaggletoothed Gusta arrives in Springdale, Maine, lugging her one precious possession: a beloved old French horn, her...

In 1939, after cruel treatment at her orphanage renders her mute, Lucy runs away and joins the circus, working with the elephants and unaware that the orphanage matrons are hunting for her.