"When Norris, a Black French Canadian, starts his junior year at an Austin, Texas, high school, he views his fellow students as clichés from "a bad 90s teen movie."" -- Norris Kaplan is clever, cynical, and quite possibly too smart for his own good. A Black French Canadian whose family just moved to Austin, Texas, Norris finds himself cataloging everyone he meets: the Cheerleaders, the Jocks, the Loners, and even the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. He's...

This is the story of two small-town former high school sweethearts from opposite sides of the tracks. Now middle-aged, they have taken wildly divergent paths, but neither has lived the life they imagined, and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever altered their world. When they are both called back to their hometown for the funeral of the mentor who once gave them shelter, they will be forced to confront the choices each has made,...

Sethe, an escaped slave who now lives in post-Civil War Ohio, has borne the unthinkable and works hard at "beating back the past." She struggles to keep Beloved, an intruder, from gaining possession of her present while throwing off the legacy of her past.

Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who encounters a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream and the battle for his catch becomes one of survival against a band of marauding sharks.

After fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the Joad family finds the conditions in California are almost as bad, as people fight for jobs and their own day-to-day survival.

Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, the hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody tends and trains his horse, restlessly anticipating the moment he will sit high upon Gabilan's saddle. But when Gabilan falls ill, Jody...