One month before graduating from his Central Florida high school, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen basks in the predictable boringness of his life until the beautiful and exciting Margo Roth Spiegelman, Q's neighbor and classmate, takes him on a midnight adventure and then mysteriously disappears.

Forging inseparable bonds in childhood that reinforce them throughout their teen years, two girls and three boys go their separate ways as adults and encounter respective tragedies and transformations.

Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father--a former concert pianist and teacher--moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father ... until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. An unforgettable story of love on...

Inseparable best friends Kate and Tully, two young women who, despite their very different lives, have vowed to be there for each other forever, have been true to their promise for thirty years, until events and choices in their lives tear them apart.

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920 and taking its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post—World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status seeking. The novel famously helped F. Scott Fitzgerald gain...

A story of a boy and his dog in the Texas hill country ranks high in the annals of boy and dogdom. Gipson, in earlier books, has evinced an evocative quality which recaptures for the reader the sounds, the smells, the sights of the region he knows and loves, recaptures too the emotional quality, the moods of his central figure. This was particularly true in Hound-Dog Man, which for some readers was marred by the vernacular. In Old Yeller the story...

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from...

Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe,...

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the coming-of-age story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet fromative years in the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn. This poignant and moving classic of American literature is filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and incident.

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.