It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands from her early days playing honky-tonk bars in Washington State and Nashville, plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow...

Edward Dickens, the tenth child of author Charles Dickens, has consistently let down his parents. Unable to apply himself at school and adrift in life, the teenaged boy is sent to Australia in the hopes that he can make something of himself - or at least fall out of the public eye. Determined to prove to his parents and more importantly, himself, that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness, Edward works hard at his new life amidst various...

For readers of Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone and David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, C. B. Bernard's debut novel shows a father and a daughter fighting toward hope through a traumatic past. In the town of Disappointment, Oregon, washed-up boxer Lewis Yaw makes ends meet as a fishing guide. He's lived a life of violence, but doesn't understand real strength until he meets Janey, who can see good in even the most damaged things-including him. When...

"Thirteen-year-old Calvin knows he's destined to be a star. . . if he can just stop making embarrassing mistakes onstage, like getting stuck on a single line—'Forsooth!'—during the school play. The summer after seventh grade, he's hoping for a fresh start. All he has to do is prove himself as an actor and fix the awkwardness with his friends that started after the play. But nothing's going according to plan. His parents don't get his...

Marcos Rivas is desperate to escape the projects, his neglectful mother, and her abusive boyfriend, but when he is picked for a class at his high school targeting smart students who are underperforming, he initially resists.

In 1983 seventh-grader David Da-Wei Horowitz has a lot to worry about--his bar mitzvah is coming soon, his Jewish and Chinese grandmothers argue about everything, his teammates for the upcoming trivia contest, Scott and Hector, do not like each other, he is beginning to notice girls, and Scott has persuaded him to begin digging a fallout shelter just in case the Cold War heats up.

"Musical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway...but when Riley takes her mom's car without permission, she's grounded and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad's game shop. Riley can't waste her time working...so she convinces Nathan--a nerdy teen employee--to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she'll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous...Soon, Riley starts to...

It's 1993, and Generation X pulses to the beat of Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement. Sixteen-year-old Maggie Lynch is uprooted from big-city Chicago to a windswept town on the Irish Sea. Surviving on care packages of Spin magazine and Twizzlers from her rocker uncle Kevin, she wonders if she'll ever find her place in this new world. When first love and sudden death simultaneously strike, a naive but determined Maggie embarks on a forbidden pilgrimage...

Twelve-year-old Lydia, feeling threatened by the attention her changing body is getting from boys and men, finds a way to take control of her own skin.

From the moment she met Samantha, star of the school basketball team, on her first day at Daniel Boone Middle School, Allison Drake felt she had found a friend, something she needs badly since her brother died and her father left--but as their friendshipgrows it begins to evolve into a deeper emotion, and in North Carolina in 1977, it is not easy to discover that you might be gay.