Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
read more
The Little Book is the extraordinary tale of Wheeler Burden, California-exiled heir of the famous Boston banking Burdens, philosopher, student of history, legend’s son, rock idol, writer, lover of women, recluse, half-Jew, and Harvard baseball hero. In 1988 he is forty-seven, living in San Francisco. Suddenly he is—still his modern self—wandering in a city and time he knows mysteriously well: fin de siècle Vienna. It is 1897, precisely ninety-one years before his last memory and a half-century before his birth.
It’s not long before Wheeler has acquired appropriate clothes, money, lodging, a group of young Viennese intellectuals as friends,
read more
It is a June unlike any other before, with temperatures soaring to asphyxiating heights. All across the world, freak weather patterns—and the life-shattering catastrophes they entail—have become the norm. The twenty-first century has entered a new phase.
But Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her life after a devastating car accident that has left her disconnected from the world, a prisoner of her own guilt and grief. Determined to make a fresh start, and shake off memories of her wrecked past, she leaves London for a temporary posting as an art therapist at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital,
read more
Fatima Abdullah has exactly nine days left to live. For 992 nights, the eighty-five-year-old matriarch of a sprawling Arab American family has received nightly visits from the immortal Scheherazade, the bold and beautiful Persian queen who saved her own life with the spellbinding tales known as The Arabian Nights. Scheherazade has asked Fatima to share one story from her past on each visit. But on the 1,001st night, Fatima knows her storytelling—and her life—will come to an end. With time running out, Fatima still has many accounts to settle. She must find a wife for her openly gay grandson, teach Arabic to her wayward teenage great-granddaughter,
read more
“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her — her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope,
read more
In her spellbinding new novel, Alice Hoffman shows us how loss and grief can be transformed into action, love, and hope. It is the tale of Green, who must learn to open herself to others in a post-disaster world. To do so, she must collect the stories of a number of “witches” and continue to write her own.
Ages: 12 and up
Grades: 7 and up
read more
