When he finds a lost beagle in the hills behind his West Virginia home, Marty tries to hide it from his family and the dog's real owner, a mean-spirited man known to shoot deer out of season and to mistreat his dogs.

Bigger, a young black man in Chicago, kills his first victim in a moment of panic. He then goes on to kill again. The book describes the feelings of freedom and identity Bigger gains from these acts.

In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close. The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in a another house just like her own. Only it's different...At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind up angels that flutter about the...

"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors. Baring the fallacy of the American dream-that wealth erases all problems-Steinbeck's classic illustrates our fall from innocence."--Pub.desc.

A troubled teenaged Indian orphan, about to commit a massive act of violence, finds himself traveling back and forth through time in search of his true identity, stopping at such places as an Idaho reservation in the early 1970s and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...

"Isaiah Quintabe's first love, Grace, has been kidnapped by his sworn enemy, the professional hitman Skip Hanson. Skip is savage and psychotic, determined to punish Isaiah for sending him to prison and destroying his life. Isaiah and his sometimes partner, ex-hustler Juanell Dodson, together again, must track scant clues through L.A.'s perilous landscape as Grace's predicament grows more uncertain. A complication arises in the form of Winnie Hando,...

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small...

"John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam." "The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in the slumping factory town of...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...