The Elephant Man

Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

Mad Miss Mimic

Sarah Henstra · 259 pages

London, 1872. Seventeen-year-old heiress Leonora Somerville is preparing to be presented to society -- again. She's strikingly beautiful and going to be very rich, but Leo has a problem money can't solve. A curious speech disorder causes her to stutter but also allows her to imitate other people's voices flawlessly. Servants and ladies alike call her "Mad Miss Mimic" behind her back ... and watch

Hide and Seek

Wilkie Collins · 356 pages

"At the center of Hide and Seek (1854) a secret waits to be revealed. Why should the apparently respectable painter Valentine Blyth refuse to account for the presence in his household of the beautiful girl known only as Madonna? It is not until his young friend Zack Thorpe--rebelling against his repressive father--takes up with bad company and meets a mysterious stranger that the secret of Madonna

A Memory of Violets: A Novel of London's Flower Sellers

Hazel Gaynor · 450 pages

"Step into the world of Victorian London, where the wealth and poverty exist side by side. This is the story of two long-lost sisters, whose lives take different paths, and the young woman who will be transformed by their experiences. In 1912, twenty-year-old Tilly Harper leaves the peace and beauty of her native Lake District for London, to become assistant housemother at Mr. Shaw's Home for Wate

Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Petey

Ben Mikaelsen · 280 pages

In 1922 Petey, who has cerebral palsy, is misdiagnosed as an idiot and institutionalized; sixty years later, still in the institution, he befriends a boy and shares with him the joy of life.

The Story of Beautiful Girl

Rachel Simon · 346 pages

A novel about a woman who can't speak, a man who is deaf, and a widow who finds herself suddenly caring for a newborn baby. Pennsylvania, 1968. Lynnie, and her sweetheart Homan, have escaped from The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, an institution where people with disabilities were routinely shut off from society, and left to languish, forgotten.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

Lucky Broken Girl

Ruth Behar · 243 pages

In 1960s New York, fifth-grader Ruthie, a Cuban-Jewish immigrant, must rely on books, art, her family, and friends in her multicultural neighborhood when an accident puts her in a body cast.

Dark Fire

C.J. Sansom · 553 pages

It is 1540 and the hottest summer of the sixteenth cantury. Matthew Shardlake, believing himself out of favour with Thomas Cromwell, is busy trying to maintain his legal practice and keep a low profile. But his involvement with a murder case, defending a girl accused of brutally murdering her young cousin, brings him once again into contact with the king's chief minister - and a new assignment ...

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · 544 pages

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are t

The Door In The Wall

Marguerite de Angeli · 120 pages

From the back cover of Scholastic Inc. copy of this book: By Marguerite de Angeli, recipient of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the Regina Medal, and the Newberry Medal. The bells clang above plague-ridden London as Robin lies helpless, cold, and hungry. The great house is empty, his father is fighting the Scots in the north, his mother is traveling with the Queen, and the servants have f

The Witch's Brat

Rosemary Sutcliff · 128 pages

Johnny Got His Gun

Dalton Trumbo · 271 pages

This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered--not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives ... This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless and gruesome ... but so is wa

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo · 443 pages

In fifteenth-century Paris, a disfigured man named Quasimodo, who was abandoned as an infant in the cathedral of Notre-Dame and now lives in its bell tower, must come to the aid of a beautiful gypsy girl named Esmeralda after she repels the advances of the cruel archdeacon Don Claude Frollo.

The Crazy Man

Pamela Porter · 176 pages

Twelve-year-old Emaline Bitterman loves her home on the prairies. She loves helping her father in the fields and her dog, Prince. But farming in southern Saskatchewan in the mid 1960s is not easy. And then one day Emaline tries to stop Prince from chasing a hare into the path of the tractor her father is driving, and her leg is caught in the discer, leaving her with a permanent disability. In his

The Architect of Song

A.G. Howard · 439 pages

A lady imprisoned by deafness, an architect imprisoned by his past, and a ghost imprisoned within the petals of a flower – intertwine in this love story that transcends life and death. For most of her life, Juliet Emerline has subsisted – isolated by deafness – making hats in the solitude of her home. Now, she’s at risk to lose her sanctuary to Lord Nicolas Thornton, a mysterious and eccentric

T4

Ann Clare LeZotte · 112 pages

When the Nazi party takes control of Germany, thirteen-year-old Paula, who is deaf, finds her world-as-she-knows-it turned upside down, as she is taken into hiding to protect her from the new law nicknamed T4.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store

James McBride · 614 pages

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared amb

Icy Sparks

Gwyn Hyman Rubio · 308 pages

At the age of ten, an Appalachian girl develops croaks, jerks and spasms, which leads to her explusion from school. After treatment--she has Tourette's syndrome--she learns to control herself, attends college and there is a happy ending.

Stones from the River

Ursula Hegi · 528 pages

Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's a girl, to the Jews Trudy harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a

Making Faces

Amy Harmon · 300 pages

Lisa Genova eBox Set: Still Alice, Left Neglected, and Love Anthony

Lisa Genova · 1,000 pages