When fifteen-year-old Lance Covington finds an abandoned baby in the backseat of a car, he knows she's the newborn daughter of a meth addict he's been trying to help. But when the police arrest him for kidnapping, Lance is thrust into a criminal world of baby trafficking and drug abuse. His mother, Barbara, looks for help from Kent Harlan - the man whom she secretly loves and who once helped rescue her daughter from a mess of her own. Kent flies to...

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck,...

Describes drug addiction, its symptoms and manifestations; the effect of an addict on his or her family; how to handle the pressures of living with an addict; and how to get help.

'Former Broadway dancer and current agoraphobic Billy Shine has not set foot outside his apartment in almost a decade. He has glimpsed his neighbors--beautiful manicurist Rayleen, lonely old Ms. Hinman, bigoted and angry Mr. Lafferty, kind-hearted Felipe, and 9-year-old Grace and her former addict mother Eileen. But most of them have never seen Billy. Not until Grace begins to sit outside on the building's front stoop for hours every day, inches from...

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the 17th century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in the hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter the idea that art could transcend...

As a teenage runaway and child of an addict, Christy-Lynn learned the hard way that no address was permanent, and no promise sacred. For a while, she found a safe haven in her marriage to bestselling crime novelist Stephen Ludlow--until his car skidded into Echo Bay. But Stephen's wasn't the only body pulled from the icy waters that night. When details about a mysterious violet-eyed blonde become public, a media circus ensues, and Christy-Lynn runs...

The memoir of a young woman who at age 15 was living on the streets and eating garbage, her survival - to her acceptance into Harvard, a feat that prompted a Lifetime movie and a successful motivational-speaking career.

Ben Storm is living the perfect life in Texas at a children's home. Suddenly his entire source of stability and friendships are ripped away when he is told he will be moving to Southern California. After a few months, his relatives turn him over to a man they say is his dad and he finds himself living a tenuous situation with a father he has never known. Unable to forge a relationship with his father due to years spent apart because of his dad's chemical...

"Stranded in a volatile, ever-shifting family, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests...