The extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller that is now a major motion picture, Markus Zusak's unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul.
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
When Death has a story to tell, you listen.
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.
Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.
“The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times
“Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today
When her mother dies, fifteen-year-old Keelie Heartwood is forced to leave her beloved California to live with her nomadic father at a renaissance festival in Colorado. After arriving, Keelie finds men in tights and women in trailer trash-tight bodices roaming half-drunk, calling each other lady and lord even after closing time! Playacting the Dark Ages is an L.A. girl’s worst nightmare.
Keelie has a plan to ditch this medieval geekland ASAP, but while she plots, strange things start happening―eerie, yet familiar. When Keelie starts seeing fairies and communicating with trees, she uncovers a secret that links her to a community of elves. As Keelie tries to come to grips with her elfin roots, disaster strikes, and Keelie’s identity isn’t the only thing that’s threatened.
One part human determination and one part elfin magic, Keelie Heartwood is a witty new heroine in a world where fantasy and reality mix with extraordinary results.
When sixteen-year-old Lily Willison and her friends Nikki, Arielle, and Grazia start up a girls' soccer club and name their team the Weregirls, they soon find themselves drawn into a battle between good and evil. Lily's father, a supernatural guardian, makes contact with Lily after his death and reveals that she has magical powers―as do her friends.
As the girls learn more about their powers, they inadvertently awaken the Breed, sworn enemies of the Weregirls. To fight the Weregirls, the Breed Master calls upon Lily's soccer rival―the rich, conceited, and arrogant Andra Hewlit. Desperate for powers of her own, Andra will do anything she can to destroy Lily and the Weregirls….
A young man's quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence
These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world and amplify them." Josh Swiller recited this speech to himself on the day he arrived in Mununga, a dusty village on the shores of Lake Mweru. Deaf since a young age, Swiller spent his formative years in frustrated limbo on the sidelines of the hearing world, encouraged by his family to use lipreading and the strident approximations of hearing aids to blend in. It didn't work. So he decided to ditch the well-trodden path after college, setting out to find a place so far removed that his deafness would become irrelevant.
That place turned out to be Zambia, where Swiller worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. There he would encounter a world where violence, disease, and poverty were the mundane facts of life. But despite the culture shock, Swiller finally commanded attention―everyone always listened carefully to the white man, even if they didn't always follow his instruction. Spending his days working in the health clinic with Augustine Jere, a chubby, world-weary chess aficionado and a steadfast friend, Swiller had finally found, he believed, a place where his deafness didn't interfere, a place he could call home. Until, that is, a nightmarish incident blasted away his newfound convictions.
At once a poignant account of friendship through adversity, a hilarious comedy of errors, and a gripping narrative of escalating violence, The Unheard is an unforgettable story from a noteworthy new talent.
Twelve-year-old Fiona finds an unopened love letter containing mysterious symbols when she and her parents clean out her recently deceased grandmother�s house. She soon realizes the symbols contain clues to a long-hidden treasure. Solving the mystery requires Fiona to learn more about astronomy and mythology as she discovers evidence of two murders and a kidnapping, encounters a ghost, and eventually finds treasure.
For her little sister, Claire has put together a guide that covers everything a freshman needs to know but didn't even think to ask. Andie reads every word and even shares it with her best friend, Bess.
But sometimes they wonder if Harvard-bound Claire got everything right! In this hilarious and honest look at one girl's heroic attempt to conquer high school, readers will get all the benefit of Claire's wisdom about making those four years more than bearable—and absolutely memorable. Fortunately, high school happens only once in a lifetime.
The exchange of daughters that began in SOPHIE-PITT TURNBULL DISCOVERS AMERICA continues! Excited (not to say desperate) as Cherokee Salamanca is to get out of Brooklyn, she starts having doubts about her summer in London even before she leaves Heathrow Airport. To start with, the Pitt- Turnbulls speak a language only vaguely like the one Cherokee knows as English. And then Putney reminds her of New Jersey — an oddly polite Jersey where people eat pizza with a fork. But Cherokee is a girl who likes a challenge, and there’s no way she’s going to let the British defeat her. The question is: will she conquer the British?
Calla thought that her boyfriend breaking up with her in a text message was the worst thing that could ever happen to her. But just two weeks later, her mother died in a freak accident, and life as she knew it was completely over. With her father heading to California for a new job, they decide that Calla should spend a few weeks with the grandmother she barely knows while he gets them set up.
To Calla's shock, her mother's hometown of Lily Dale is a town full of psychics―including her grandmother. Suddenly, the fact that her mother never talked about her past takes on more mysterious overtones. The longer she stays in town, the stranger things become, as Calla starts to experience unusual and unsettling events that lead her to wonder whether she has inherited her grandmother's unique gift. Is it this gift that is making her suspect that her mother's death was more than an accident, or is it just an overactive imagination? Staying in Lily Dale is the only way to uncover the truth. But will Calla be able to deal with what she learns about her mother's past and her own future?
To save his family, one boy will defy the power of two armies in 15th-century China.
Shen and his sister Chang are on the run. It's 1403, and the city of Nanjing is under siege. Their mother has been imprisoned, and their father, an Imperial Bodyguard, is presumed dead. Hoping to avoid detection for their connection to the former regime, Shen and Chang take refuge in a traveling acrobat troupe.
Meanwhile, the new emperor has commanded the construction of an armada to explore the world the -- treasure fleet. But a violent struggle breaks out between Zheng He, the powerful leader of the fleet, and the government officials who fear him.
Fleeing the growing conflict, the acrobats gain passage with the fleet. Shen soon discovers they'll be sharing their vessel with the notorious Yang Rong, a government official with the power to free their mother.
Shen and Chang enter a dangerous game of double-dealing. After months at sea they manage to defy the power of both armies, and they eventually save their parents. But they also discover that their own lives have been changed forever. The China they knew no longer exists. For Shen especially, it is too late to go home.
Set in a period of unparalleled Chinese exploration and rich with historical detail, Shen and the Treasure Fleet is an adventure of majestic proportions.
Joe doesn't feel much like a warrior-hero.** But evil is stirring in the heart of Elfwood, and the people of Muddle Earth need help (although most of them don't know it yet). Perhaps Joe Jefferson really is a hero after all. . . .
* Actually, Muddle Earth's only wizard. And he's not very good.
** He doesn't really look much like one either.