Exiled back to Montverre, an ancient and elite academy hidden in the mountains where his fate hangs in the balance, Laeo Martin, in the rarified world of learning he once loved, feels a strange connection to the new Magister as the legendary Midsummer Game approaches.

It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, 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.

Kawakami's novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormenters. These raw and realistic portrayals of bullying are counterbalanced by textured exposition of the philosophical and religious...

It is 1987, and only one person has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus -- her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn's company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend.

A young girl growing up in an Alabama town in the 1930s learns of injustice and violence when her father, a widowed lawyer, defends a black man falsely accused of rape.

A club-footed orphan struggles for independence, his intellectual development and his attempt to become an artist.

Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

A little boy who helps during the construction of a red barn on his family's land recalls his life as he and the barn grow older together.

"In one impulsive moment the summer before they leave for college, overachievers Scarlett and David plunge into an irresistible swirl of romance, particle physics, and questionable decisions. Scarlett and David have known each other all their lives in small-town Graceville, Colorado, where David is just another mountain in the background, until, one day, he is suddenly so much more than part of the landscape. Magnetic, spontaneous, David is a gravitational...

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakh?ta people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn?t return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato?where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies...