Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.

"There was always an old woman dying in the back room of her grandmother's house when Isla was a child... Isla Larsen Sanchez's life begins to unravel when her father passes away. Instead of being comforted at home in New Jersey, her mother starts leaving her in Puerto Rico with her great-aunt each summer, like a piece of forgotten luggage. It is only when Isla turns eighteen, and her grandmother, a great storyteller, dies, that Isla discovers she...

Kress shows you effective solutions for potential problems at each stage of your story-- essential lessons for strong start-to-finish storytelling.

"As Paris teeters on the edge of the German occupation, a young French woman closes the door to her late grandmother's treasure-filled apartment, unsure if she'll ever return. An elusive courtesan, Marthe de Florian cultivated a life of art and beauty, casting out all recollections of her impoverished childhood in the dark alleys of Montmartre. With Europe on the brink of war, she shares her story with her granddaughter Solange Beaugiron, using her...

Imprisoned by Natacha, a witch, in a New York apartment, Alex must tell her a new scary story every night in order to stay alive.

"A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling. A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade. In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely...

"Dortchen Wild lives in the small German kingdom of Hesse-Cassel in the early 19th century. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to the boy next door, the handsome but very poor fairy tale scholar Wilhelm Grimm. It is a time of tyranny and terror: Napoleon Bonaparte wants to conquer all of Europe, and Hesse-Cassel is one of the first kingdoms to fall. Forced to live under oppressive French rule, Wilhelm and his brothers quietly rebel by preserving...

Cardan Greenbriar, High King of Elfhame, visits the mortal world to face the troll woman, Aslog of the West. Before he was a cruel prince or a wicked king, Cardan was a faerie child with a heart of stone...and a wicked tongue. Born into a family overburdened with heirs, nourished on cat milk and contempt, perhaps it's no surprise he turned out the way he did. This is the story of Elfhame's enigmatic high king, Cardan-- and his visits the mortal world...

"In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of a sun-drenched summer of his youth, and of the killer that stalked the small New England town. And of the terrible tragedy that forever bonded him with his friends Nat and Harper in unknowable ways. Decades later, Wilder returns to the town in an attempt to recount that summer's events in his memoirs. But as he writes,...