"When Noor returns to her native Iran for the first time in thirty years, with her very American daughter, Lily, so much about her homeland is different. But Café Leila--the restaurant Noor's family has run for three generations--hasn't changed. A neighborhood café in Tehran is at the center of this powerful and transporting story of love, family, friendship, and homecoming told against the backdrop of Iran's rich, yet tragic, history"--

Franklin Starlight's comfort in solitude and experience in the wilderness make him appear wise beyond his sixteen years. But when his ailing father, Eldon, summons him back to town, Franklin's sense of duty clashes with the deep resentment he feels for his father's many years of absence and neglect. Finding Eldon near death after years of drinking, Franklin grudgingly agrees to help carry out his father's final wish to be buried in the warrior way,...

In the city of Egunu, Nigeria, fifteen year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a somewhat cloistered life. Their father is a wealthy businessman, they live in a beautiful home, and attend private school. But, through Kambili's eyes, we see that their home life is anything but harmonious. Her father, a fanatically religious man has impossible expectations of his children and his wife, and if things don't go his way he becomes physically abusive....

"In 1968, a disillusioned and heartbroken Lillian Carlson left Atlanta after the assassination of Martin Luther King. She found meaning in the hearts of orphaned African children and cobbled together her own small orphanage in the Rift Valley alongside the lush forests of Rwanda.Three decades later, in New York City, Rachel Shepherd, lost and heartbroken herself, embarks on a journey to find the father who abandoned her as a young child, determined...

"Nikki lives in cosmopolitan West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she's spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community of her childhood, preferring a more independent (that is, Western) life. When her father's death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a 'creative writing' course at the community...

Bernard Levy, always a mystery to his community of Guilford, Mississippi, was even more of a mystery to his son Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now in 1962, Mickey Moe sets out into backwoods Mississippi and Tennessee to uncover his father's murky past during the Great Flood of 1927.