This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next fourteen years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years-a book in the tradition of...

A fictionalized biography of the eighteenth-century African woman who, as a child, was brought to New England to be a slave, and after publishing her first poem when a teenager, gained renown throughout the colonies as an important black American poet.

Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins, share an obsession with words. As adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation begins to push them apart. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition. A comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the English language...

In post-World War I Britain, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard travels to Cornwall to investigate three mysterious deaths. Accompanying him is his constant companion, a young Scot he executed on the battlefield whose tormenting voice forces him to face unpleasant truths. By the author of A Test of Wills

Victoria Trumbull may be ninety-two, but she is as sharp as the proverbial tack. So when she is the only one to spot something amiss in the town cemetery, the police chief listens. Something is indeed amiss. First comes a request to disinter a coffin for reburying elsewhere. Then things go wrong from there.

"A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution"-- "Admired by George Washington, ridiculed by Thomas Jefferson, published in London, and read far and wide, Phillis Wheatley led one of the most extraordinary American lives. Seized in West Africa and forced into slavery as a child, she was sold to a merchant family in Boston, where she became a noted poet at a young age. Mastering the...

"From an early age, Little Amanda read everything she could get her hands on, from books to cereal boxes. Growing up with an auditory processing disorder and a speech impediment, Amanda had to work hard, but ultimately she took great strength from her experiences. After hearing her teacher read aloud to the class, she knew that she wanted to become a poet, and nothing would stand in her way. At the age of 19, she became America's first-ever National...

When her family moves to the Kansas Territory in 1855, thirteen-year-old poet Lucy Thomkins searches for her purpose in life, while she witnesses the conflict between the proslavery Border Ruffians and the anti-slavery Insiders like her father.

What if the old maid of Amherst wasn't an old maid at all? The poet dons a hundred veils, alternately playing wounded lover, penitent, and female devil in this extraordinary adventure that will disturb and delight.