An estimated 300,000 child soldiers now fight in the more than fifty violent conflicts raging around the globe. Far removed from the world of pundits and journalists, policymakers and diplomats, a thirteen-year-old boy named Ishmael Beah became one of these young warriors in Sierra Leone. Now in his mid-twenties, he courageously tells of the horrific road that led him to wield an AK-47 and, fueled by trauma and drugs, commit terrible acts. A Long Way Gone brings a rare voice of frontline realism to a widely publicized (and widely misunderstood) human-rights crisis.
In poignantly clear and dauntless storytelling,
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Artist Miranda Jones wants to cause both success and love in her life, and takes a summer job at the University of Alaska to gain perspective on her life. Meanwhile, in the picturesque coastal town of Milford-Haven, the unfinished Clarke mansion draws Deputy Delmar Johnson, battered wife Stacey Chernak and rebellious environmentalist Susan Winslow, even as its builder Jack Sawyer sidesteps both building codes and a guilty conscience. Zack Calvin tries to recover from his brush with death but sinks deeper into a tangled romance with Cynthia Radcliffe. Sally O’Mally’s conscience tells her to confess an ancient sin to her old love,
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In his first novel since The Light of Day, the Booker Prize–winning author gives us a luminous tale about the closest of human bonds.
On a midsummer’s night Paula Hook lies awake; Mike, her husband of twenty-five years, asleep beside her; her teenage twins, Nick and Kate, sleeping in nearby rooms. The next day, she knows, will redefine all of their lives. A revelation lies in store. Her children’s future lies before them. The house holds the family’s history and fate.
Recalling the years before and after her children were born,
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Sue Monk Kidd’s ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 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 of the town’s fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees,
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At twelve, Lucy Marie McGowan already knows she’ll be a psychologist when she grows up. And her quirky and conflicted family provides plenty of opportunity for her to practice her calling. Now Lucy, her “profoundly gifted” twin brother, Milo, her commitment-phobic mother, and her New Age grandmother are leaving Chicago for Timber Falls, Wisconsin, to care for her dying grandfather—a complex and difficult man whose failure as a husband and father still painfully echoes down through the years.
Lucy believes her time in the rural town where the McGowan story began will provide a key piece to the puzzle of her family’s broken past,
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With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls “musical misalignments.” Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans;
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