Buddy Pennington is headed to river country. No one in his village will miss him anyway-- not even his mom, after what he and his bad luck did. He'll be better off with his daddy, Davey Boy Pennington, a wandering soul who has the best luck of anyone Buddy knows. Pop might even teach Buddy his legendary skills at Parsnit, a mysterious card game of magic, chance, and above all, storytelling. No one tells a better story than Pop. But no sooner are Buddy...

Fourteen-year-old Pudge spends most of his time in the basement avoiding his marine biologist father and playing World of Warcraft, but when missing school earns him a suspension and he joins his father at work, he must summon real courage to help a mother humpback whale.

For as long as he can remember, Malcolm has never felt like he was good enough. Not for his parents, who have always seemed at odds with each other, with Malcolm caught in between. And especially not for his dad, whose competitive drive and love for sports Malcolm has never shared. That is, until Malcolm discovers miniature golf, the one sport he actually enjoys. Maybe it's the way in which every hole is a puzzle to be solved. Or the whimsy of the...

Whether he is deliriously funny or philosophically profound, as a novelist and a playwright Michael Frayn has concerned himself with the ordinary life lived by erring humans, which is always more extraordinary than people think. InMy Father's Fortune, Frayn reveals the original exemplar of the extraordinary-ordinary life: his father, Tom Frayn. A clever lad, a roofing salesman with a winning smile and a racetrack vocabulary, Tom Frayn emerged undaunted...

In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots-fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They're a family, hidden and safe. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled "HAP," he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio-a past spent hunting humans. When...

Two boys' lives are changed forever when a sinister travelling carnival stops at their Illinois town.

After his father's death, seventh-grader Sam West is whisked from Louisiana to Oklahoma, where he discovers a mysterious tree trunk that leads to a world where Pa is still alive.

Little Choo wants to be just like his father Papa Pufferbelly, but pulling a line of freight cars up a steep mountain might be a little too much for the small engine.

The way twelve-year-old Ked Eakins of Norton, Maine, sees it his life has been stolen from him, piece by piece; first by kyphosis, a spinal abnormality which has made him a social outcast at school and a target for the school bully, by his friends who have recently abandoned him, by his mother who left for the West Coast taking the insurance which might have saved him with her, and by his father who is a gambling addict who has lost the rent money--but...

A young boy and his father celebrate the joys of a city in the winter, with snowfall, icicles, sled riding, hot steaming chocolate, warm clothes, and sidewalk singers.