Presents a novel based on the life of the author's grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed five hundred miles as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children.

Fleeing an unhappy past in England, penniless Lucy Snowe starts life anew at a boarding school in cosmopolitan Villette, a stand-in for Brussels. The mystery, jealousy, and love that she finds there give Charlotte Bront?'s final novel much of the Gothic tone and psychological incisiveness that prompted George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others to call Villette her finest work. Based on Bront?'s own experiences in Brussels and her attachment to a brilliant...

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities. Ada begins her life in...

The story of a boy who loses both parents at an early age, and who escapes the torture of working for his pitiless stepfather to make something of himself and, with any luck, find true happiness.

"Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as the Old Musician and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving...

Drawing on the rich experience of his own life, best-selling author Paulo Coelho takes us back in time to re-live the dreams of a generation that longed for peace and dared to challenge the established social order. In Hippie, he tells the story of a young Brazilian man, Paulo, and Karla, a Dutch woman in her twenties, who share a journey of self-discovery aboard the Magic Bus, as it travels from Amsterdam to Kathmandu in 1970. In his most autobiographical...

"Leaving behind her husband Theo and their young daughter, Claire, a writer, gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump--and a creeping case of postpartum depression. But what begins as a temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends soon mutates into an extended flight from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the...

"Homesick and alone, a teenaged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sunless days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer"--Amazon.com.

"A YA coming-of-age novel about a first-year, first-generation Blacack student at Dartmouth College." -- There are many watchers and they are always white. That is the first thing Echo notices as she settles into Dartmouth College. Despite graduating high school in Cleveland as valedictorian, she is struggling to keep up in demanding classes. The campus is not the promised rainbow-colored utopia where education lifts every voice. Nor is it a paradise...