Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for....

"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 neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

"After her final year in college, a young writer begins working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator in Sydney. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, she is dropped into hundreds of crises, hearing only pieces of each. The work itself becomes monotonous. And yet the stress of listening to far-off disasters seeps into her personal life, and she begins drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, having an affair with an ex-lover. Interwoven...

"A timely and powerful new novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant that is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, all of it informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. Nora Guerraoui, a jazz composer, returns home to a small town in the Mojave after hearing that her father, owner of a popular restaurant there, has been killed in a suspicious hit-and-run car accident. Told by multiple narrators--Nora...

19-year-old Erin travels across Iceland, Greenland and Canada to begin her experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, all the while making a documentary to record how survivalism and society's accepted personal freedom boundaries differ between the sexes.

"Sara is studying at a prestigious British university and seeks a reprise from her loneliness by practicing the traditional craft she learned in India when she was young: pottery. She recalls her childhood, the lost dog, Chinna, who brings a community together, and the life of her revered pottery teacher, Elango, a Hindu who faced prejudice after falling in love with a Muslim woman. Switching with ease between Sara's diary entries and Elango's life...

A family extending from Pakistan to California, deals with generations of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness.

"This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach. Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality...

Pulga has his dreams. Chico has his grief. Pequena has her pride. And these three teens have one another. But, none of them have illusions about the town they've grown up in and the dangers that surround them. Even with the love of family, threats lurk around every corner. And when those threats become all too real, the trio knows they have no choice but to run: from their country, from their families, from their beloved home. Crossing from Guatemala...

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star's son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is...