"As an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Specialist, Dillon Slater had one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. Now, he's enjoying the pace of life in Shelter Bay, where he teaches high school physics. He still gets to blow things up, but as the school basketball coach he also gets to impart leadership skills. His latest minefield: fifteen-year-old Matt Templeton; and Matt's irresistible mother. Claire Templeton moved her troubled teenage son to...

Find out about the jobs people do, from builders and firefighters to doctors and vets.

When her behavior escalates out of control, fourteen-year-old Wren is taken away to a wilderness therapy camp where she is forced to develop new skills, including the courage to ask for help.

Seventeen-year-old Edgar Poe's plans to escape his foster family, begin classes at the prestigious new university, and marry his beloved Elmira Royster go awry when a macabre Muse appears with a request.

A young boy living in the Ozarks achieves his heart's desire when he becomes the owner of two redbone hounds and teaches them to be champion hunters.

"Michael Rowland is not your typical teenager. Deaf from birth, he's always looked out for his five-year-old brother, Joshua. When his stepfather comes after Joshua, Michael takes the child and runs. He's determined to protect his brother at all costs, even if that means making himself vulnerable to a danger he can't hear coming. And the danger intensifies when Michael witnesses a stranger kill his stepfather. Desperate and afraid, the boys have nowhere...

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." —Ann Patchett
Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother;...

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"Willa Cather has long been admired for O Pioneers! (1913), Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), the so-called "prairie novels" that launched her career; but the author's admirers have struggled to explain how a writer growing up in a small town in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century could have transformed what she remembered into literary greatness. A century later, scholars acknowledge Cather's place in the canon of American literature...

A most unusual series of crimes at a student hostel intrigues Inspector Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Hickory Dickory Dock, especially when a simple case of kleptomania paves the way to murder. Hercule Poirot doesn't need all his detective skills to realize something is troubling his secretary, Miss Lemon-she has made three mistakes in a simple letter. It seems an outbreak of kleptomania at the student hostel in which her sister works is distracting...