Italian teenager Giovanna searches for a sense of identity and clear perspectives when she finds herself torn between the refinements and excesses of a divided Naples.

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father -- and soon she is writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, complex crime stories that reflect skill, imagination, and talent far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse.
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this...

A twelve-year-old boy struggles with the worst kind of fame--as the sole survivor of a notorious plane crash.

Nazneen is forced into an arranged marriage with a much older man whose expectations of life are miserably low. When they flee the oppression of their Bangladeshi village for a high-rise block in the East End, she finds herself cloistered and dependent on her husband. It soon becomes apparent that of the two, she is the real survivor and more able to deal with the ways of the world and the vagaries of human behavior. Through her friendship with another...

A young girl's astonishing, poignant first look into the turbulent heart of things "I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps..." Alice McDermott's haunting and enchanting new work of fiction is narrated by a woman who was born beautiful....

More than anything in the world, Ken McLaughlin wants a horse to call his own. When Ken's father finally tells him that he can choose a colt, he firmly decides upon a beautiful young filly. But Flicka, one of the wildest, most unmanageable horses on the ranch, has a questionable bloodline and Ken's father quietly disapproves of his choice. As the boy and horse forge a lasting bond, Ken senses the changes in himself, a young man taking his first steps...

A man reflects on the summer of his fourteenth year, where in Baton Rouge he fell in love with a golden-haired girl across the street before an unspeakable crime shattered illusions in his seemingly idyllic neighborhood.

When her life of privilege is upended by a terrorist attack that ends her parents' lives, a college senior struggles to rebuild on her own terms, learning uplifting and heartbreaking life lessons throughout a series of relationships and opportunities.