"How about a story? Spin us a yarn." Instantly, Phoebe Winterbottom came to mind. "I could tell you an extensively strange story," I warned. "Oh, good!" Gram said. "Delicious!" And that is how I happened to tell them about Phoebe, her disappearing mother, and the lunatic.
Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet Francois Rabelais called the "Great Perhaps." Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young. Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy, Alaska will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
Now read by the author, this edition also includes an interview with Alice Sebold and the first chapter of her new book, The Almost Moon. When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven.
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive.
One fateful day, 16 people gather for the reading of the will of the very rich Samuel W. Westing. To their surprise, the will turns out to be a contest, challenging the heirs to find out who among them is Westing's murderer. Only two people hold all the clues. One is a Westing heir...and the other is the listener!
Riley has crossed the bridge into the afterlife - a place called Here, where time is always Now. She has picked up life where she left off when she was alive, living with her parents and dog in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. When she’s summoned before The Council, she learns that the afterlife isn’t just an eternity of leisure.
Are they flirting or fighting? This is Joey Pigza's question when the fireworks suddenly start to explode between his long-separated mom and dad, whom he's never really had a chance to see together. The more out of control his parents get, the less in control Joey feels and the more he wants to help make things better.
It started out as an ordinary summer. But the minute thirteen-year-old Zinny covered the old, overgrown trail that ran through the woods behind her family's house, she realized that things were about to change.
Nyle's life with her grandmother on their Vermont sheep farm advances rhythmically through the seasons until the night of the accident at the Cookshire nuclear power plant. Without warning, Nyle's modest world fills with protective masks, evacuations, contaminated food, disruptions, and mistrust.
Flora and Ruby do not want to move to Camden Falls. But they don't really have a choice - their parents are dead and their grandmother, Min, is taking them in. Min runs a sewing store, Needle & Thread, at the heart of Main Street in Camden Falls. There, Flora and Ruby become friends with Olivia, who likes to organize things, and Nikki, who lives on the wrong side of the tracks.
A secret world of their own Jess Aaron's greatest ambition is to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. He's been practicing all summer and can't wait to see his classmates' faces when he beats them all. But on the first day of school, a new kid, a new girl, boldly crosses over to the boy's side of the playground and outruns everyone.
A 16-year-old boy sails from 19th-century Nantucket to a remote California bay with his two older brothers and finds himself in mysterious circumstances involving the death of one brother and the strange obsession of the other.
Jefferson is an innocent and unwitting party to a deadly liquor store shoot-out in the 1940s. As the only survivor, he is tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, a university-trained teacher at the plantation school, is persuaded to visit Jefferson in his cell. Wiggins is torn between staying in his native Cajun community or moving on.
