Rapido makes deliveries all over town, bringing everything from a croissant to a new cash register.

This is an erotic historical romance based on a journal written at the start of the 16th century by a young man called Antonio, who grew up in the village of Cortona in northern Italy. His mother died in childbirth, his brother moved away to find work in Perugia, and he was left living with his father Giorgio, from whom he learned the trade of carpentry. The novel takes the form of a picaresque adventure in search of work. This leads to his meeting several of the famous artists of the time, painting frescoes in different churches. As he progresses past adolescence, he discovers women to his delight. Antonio is clearly an honest, generous, affectionate and good looking young man. As he moves from one village to another, he meets a variety of young women whose wishes and desires he is unable to resist.Increasingly he becomes aware of the wider world and the fractious politics of the time. The Borgias are in power in the Vatican, and Cesare Borgia is rampaging through Tuscany, working his way towards Cortona. He sends his agent, Leonardo da Vinci, to survey the local fortifications, and Antonio almost meets him.There is also a studious side to his nature, and he finds a mentor at the local monastery who teaches him how to write, and keeps him informed about the events of the day, including the scandals surrounding the Borgias. Other events include meeting a ghost at an ancient monastery, and consulting a soothsayer who reveals his future.Running through this story is a golden thread, with one end being his abiding love for a particular woman, the great love of his young life, who seems beyond his reach. As he moves from one romantic attachment to another, it is his true love who really occupies his thoughts. As his future unfolds, we see him holding onto that thread, and somehow hoping that he would never have to let it go. How the story is played out against the short term vicissitudes of his life is finally revealed in the last chapter. This story is truly a Rite of Passage from youth to manhood.

Reading the World’s Stories is volume 5 in the Bridges to Understanding series of annotated international youth literature bibliographies sponsored by the United States Board on Books for Young People. USBBY is the United States chapter of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), a Switzerland-based nonprofit whose mission is bring books and children together. The series promotes sharing international children’s books as a way to facilitate intercultural understanding and meet new literary voices. This volume follows Children’s Books from Other Countries (1998), The World though Children’s Books (2002), Crossing Boundaries with Children’s Books (2006), and Bridges to Understanding: Envisioning the World through Children’s Books (2011) and acts as a companion book to the earlier titles. Centered around the theme of the importance of stories, the guide is a resource for discovering more recent global books that fit many reading tastes and educational needs for readers aged 0-18 years. Essays by storyteller Anne Pellowski, author Beverley Naidoo, and academic Marianne Martens offer a variety of perspectives on international youth literature. This latest installment in the series covers books published from 2010-2014 and includes English-language imports as well as translations of children’s and young adult literature first published outside of the United States. These books are supplemented by a smaller number of culturally appropriate books from the US to help fill in gaps from underrepresented countries. The organization of the guide is geographic by region and country. All of the more than 800 entries are recommended, and many of the books have won awards or achieved other recognition in their home countries. Forty children’s book experts wrote the annotations. The entries are indexed by author, translator, illustrator, title, and subject. Back matter also includes international book awards, important organizations and research collections, and a selected directory of publishers known for publishing books from other countries.

As a family scrambles to get from their Paris home to the airport to begin their vacation, a series of events, triggered by a bar of soap, places some very unusual roadblocks in their way.

The Last Step is Rick Ridgeway's inside story of this extraordinary expedition. It's about the people who, battered by the mountain and their isolation, overcame their individual fears, desire, and disappointments to work together to get somebody?anybody?to the top of K2. It's about the glorious success the team achieved, and about the perilous bivouac Jim Wickwire spent just below the summit without food, oxygen or shelter in temperatures of -40F.

This edition adds Las Vegas to its thorought coverage of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, completing the circular desert route many visitors travel. It includes explanations of Native American arts and crafts, plus details on the region's spectacular national parks.

"Not real?" Coyote howled. "A filthy lie." He grabbed a wiener and shoved the end of a willow stick through its middle. The Nowherians were deployed around a rusty wheelbarrow used as a grill for their annual Fourth of July weenie roast. Jackrabbit examined the puffy black wiener on the end of his stick. "You still upset about Frijoles saying that Funnies from Nowhere is fiction?" Coyote jabbed the coals, creating an explosion of sparks and coating his wiener in ash. "You bet I am. If we're not real, then neither is Nowhere, and the cartoon character who was boner-fidee elected President of the United States isn't either." He rapped his stick to knock off the ash, and his wiener fell into the fire. "If your wiener were parallel to the stick instead of perpendicular, that wouldn't happen," offered Pearl. He stared at her until the answer came to him. "Parallel is safer but limits you to one wiener." He seized a handful, mounted a row of six, and suspended the drooping load over the fire. "My only limitations are the length of my stick and the size of the fire."

This is a story of a girl’s construction of her identity, and of her family’s search for a place in the world, for the Heimat that is so resonant for those of German background. We follow Helga through an adventurous childhood in Iran, whose vast open spaces her mother called ‘my spiritual home’. Her engineer father worked on a grand scale, designing and laying roads and railways, and tunnelling through mountain ranges. Then came the invasions of World War II, and the family, half-German, half-Austrian, found themselves on a long voyage to Australia, designated enemy aliens. They were interned for nearly five years in the dusty Victorian countryside. On their release at the end of the War, stranded in Melbourne, they sought another home. The children were dispatched to convents, and at the Academy of Mary Immaculate, Helga found a temporary homeland, in faith. Everyday life in the Australia of the late 1940s and early 1950s is freshly seen by this feisty, loving migrant family. Through their eyes, we encounter a strange place, Australia, as if for the first time. Helga’s development from a thoughtful, sensitive child to a self-possessed young woman, wrestling with her faith and with how to live a decent life, is vividly recounted.

Where have all the bedtime stories gone? A delightful addition to the picture book canon about the love of reading One dark, dark night in Burrow Down, a rabbit named Eliza Brown found a book and settled down...when a Snatchabook flew into town. It's bedtime in the woods of Burrow Down, and all the animals are ready for their bedtime story. But books are mysteriously disappearing. Eliza Brown decides to to stay awake and catch the book thief. It turns out to be a little creature called the Snatchabook who has no one to read him a bedtime story. All turns out well when the books are returned and the animals take turns reading bedtime stories to the Snatchabook.

In Jenny Han's follow-up to The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly finds out what comes after falling in love. Now available in paperback!