Last Things

The Night Rainbow

Claire King · 263 pages

It is summer in the south of France, and Pea and her little sister Margot spend their days inventing games in the meadow behind their house. Their father has died in an accident, and their mother has just lost a baby. Maman is English, already isolated in this small, foreign village, and in her compounded grief, she has retreated even further. Pea and Margot can't make Maman happy again. When Pea

We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery · 325 pages

EA novel by the French professor of philosophy Muriel Barbery. The book centers on a working-class concierge of an upscale apartment building in Paris, Renee Michel. She is an auto-didact of immense learning who deliberately conceals her intelligence. Her secret is discovered by a young resident of the building named Paloma. The novel is narrated alternately by each of these two characters. Fir

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

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 t

The Vanishing Act

Mette Jakobsen · 218 pages

Living alone on a tiny, snow-covered island with her father, dog and a magician, twelve-year-old Minou deals with her mother's abandonment and hopes to find an explanation when a dead boy washes up on the beach.

Foster

Claire Keegan · 108 pages

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house she finds affection she has not known before, and slowly she begins to blossom in their care. But when a secret is suddenly revealed, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

Up From the Blue

Susan Henderson · 320 pages

Tillie's husband is away on business, the boxes in her new home aren't unpacked, and the telephone isn't even connected yet. Though she's not due for another month, sudden labor pains force Tillie to reach out to her estranged father for help-- a choice that means facing the painful memories she's been running from since she was a child.

Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

Floating in My Mother's Palm

Ursula Hegi · 187 pages

"From an award winning author comes a deeply personal and powerful account of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in a small town in Germany in the 1950s. Hanna conjours up unforgettably the events of her youth: her magical bond to her unconventional mother; her friendship with an illegitmate son of an American GI; and the lessons in local lore that are served with tea and innuendo by the town's

Hope Farm

Peggy Frew · 352 pages

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

Song for Night

Chris Abani · 140 pages

"Trained as a human mine detector, My Luck, a boy soldier in West Africa, witnesses and takes part in unspeakable brutality. At twelve his vocal chords are cut to prevent him from screaming and giving away his platoon's presence should he be blown up. Awakening after an explosion to find that he has lost his platoon, he traces his steps back through abandoned villages and rotting corpses - and thr

That Eye, the Sky

Tim Winton · 160 pages

Lotería

Mario Alberto Zambrano · 272 pages

Using a deck of Lotería cards as her muse, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo, a ward of the state who has retreated into silence, finds each shuffle sparking a random memory that, pieced together, brings into focus the events that led to her present situation.

We the Animals

Justin Torres · 144 pages

"An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmake

La fruta del borrachero

Ingrid Rojas Contreras · 406 pages

Up High in the Trees

Kiara Brinkman · 336 pages

The Story of Mr Sommer

Patrick Suskind · 128 pages

Room

Emma Donoghue · 322 pages

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world.... Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At n

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Edisto

Padgett Powell · 183 pages

"A novel that has drawn comparisons with the work of J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote, and Flannery O?Connor, Edisto centers on one Simons Everson Manigault, a twelve-year-old possessed of a vocabulary and sophistication way beyond his years and a preadolescent bewilderment with the behavior of adults. These include his mother, who is known as the Duchess, and his enigmatic father-surrogate, Taurus. I

A Girl Made of Dust

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi · 236 pages

1980s Lebanon. Eight-year-old Ruba lives in a village outside Beirut. From her family home she can see the city's buildings and hear the rumble of shelling. As civil war tears the country apart, Ruba has her own worries - while her mother toils and struggles for money, her father avoids work and family. When Ruba decides that she must save him, she uncovers a secret which sets her on a journey fro

Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger · 208 pages

First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.

The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje · 296 pages

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure