Caring for her shy younger brother while her mother returns to work in the wake of her father's failing business and her sister's search for her birth father, 13-year-old Nellie encounters three strangers including a junkyard worker, a New York City thief and a young stripper before witnessing a shocking act of violence.

This is Mark Twain's first novel about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and it has become one of the world's best-loved books. It is a fond reminiscence of life in Hannibal, Missouri, an evocation of Mark Twain's own boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi during the 1840s. "Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred," he tells us. This is a book one never forgets: Tom whitewashing Aunt Polly's fence, Tom and Huck's dreadful oath, their...