Laura and Casey were inseparable, dreaming about the future and teaming up for the wild scavenger hunts in their small California lakeside town. Until one summer night when a shocking betrayal sent Laura running into a new life, leaving Casey and a first love in her wake. Seventeen years later Laura is pulled home--and into one more scavenger hunt with Casey. The twist: this time, the list of clues leads to the settings of their most cherished summer...

In 1940, a tragedy forces Lou, her little brother Oz, and their invalid mother to move to the mountains of southeastern Virginia, but a courtroom battle could determine the fate of the entire family. The lives of twelve-year-old Lou and her younger brother, Oz, change forever in 1940 when an accident involving their parents results in their being uprooted from their New York City home and moved to live with their great-grandmother in the mountains...

Inseparable best friends Kate and Tully, two young women who, despite their very different lives, have vowed to be there for each other forever, have been true to their promise for thirty years, until events and choices in their lives tear them apart.

When Eddie was twelve years old, all he wanted for Christmas was a bike. Although his life had gotten harder -- and money tighter -- since his father died and the family bakery closed...Eddie dreamed that somehow his mother would find a way to have his dream bike gleaming beside their modest Christmas tree that magical morning. What he got from her instead was a sweater. "A stupid, handmade, ugly sweater" that young Eddie left in a crumpled ball...

The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a black girl in an America whose love for its blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

The debut novel everyone is talking about... "The last page is as satisfying as the first.” Kathryn Stockett. "I really loved this book... I can't praise it enough.” Anne Rice. "It's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time.” Tom Franklin. It was the summer everything changed. My Sunshine Away unfolds in a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, cauldrons of spicy crawfish,...

"Camp Chippewa, 1962. Nelson Doughty, age thirteen, social outcast and overachiever, is the Bugler, sounding the reveille proudly each morning. Yet this particular summer marks the beginning of an uncertain and tenuous friendship with a popular boy named Jonathan. Over the years, Nelson, irrevocably scarred from the Vietnam War, becomes Scoutmaster of Camp Chippewa, while Jonathan marries, divorces, and turns his father's business into a highly profitable...

"After being stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe, a young woman finds herself alone in 1941 after her kidnapper dies. Her solitary existence is interrupted, however, when she happens upon a group of Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Stunned to learn what's happening in the outside world, she vows to teach the group all she can about surviving in the forest - and in turn, they teach her some...

Seventeen year-old Veronica “Ronnie” Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father… until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. Ronnie's father, a former concert pianist and teacher, is living a quiet...

"Set in South Carolina during the summer of 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three racists in town, they escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily finds refuge...