An inexplicable sickness. A small town cut off from the world. An unexpected community of survivors forges a family out of the despair, struggling against things known and unknown for survival and hope. A mysterious plague known as the Grey grips the small village of Pilam, which the world has quarantined without pity. Laying waste to Pilam's residents, the sickness saps its victims of strength, drains the color from their eyes, and kills all promise. Only the young are immune. But beyond the barricades and walls of soldiers--the manifestation of a nation's terror--there are rumors of a cure. Dunka, the eldest son of a family reeling from the Grey, takes on the daunting task of leaving Pilam to find that cure for his siblings and save them before it's too late. His brother and sisters, however, have plans of their own. Navigating the chaos of violence, hunger, and death, each of them tries to make sense of the bleak circumstances, forging new bonds with other juvenile survivors left to their own devices. Now an unlikely family of six, they choose their own perilous paths, at first separately and then together, coming to terms with the decisions they make and the ghosts they cannot leave behind. Umar Turaki's gripping novel is a story of survival, love, and the human spirit's tenacious capacity for wonder.

A deep exploration of the intersection of faith, creativity, and justice from acclaimed hip-hop artist and creative polymath Sho Baraka “Sho has the courage to say what many are thinking and the candor to say what many are not. His words have positively influenced me for years—now this book gives the world that influence.”—Lecrae You were created to help bring truth and beauty into this broken world. God made you with an imagination and a yearning for justice. No matter your calling or vocation, you can help shape a better world around you through your creativity. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy. We are surrounded by toxic stories and bad cultural thinking. We’re held back by incomplete theology. But does it have to be like that? Is frustration the end of the story? In the face of confusion and injustice, we can lose sight of our true narrative—the one that started in a garden and wants to make our real lives better today. In He Saw That It Was Good, activist and recording artist Sho Baraka wrestles deeply and honestly with these questions, gives you permission to do the same, and shows a hard-earned path to creative change. With Sho, you’ll engage with art, justice, and history. Learn from the powerful principles of historic movements, explore why it’s important to cultivate your creative calling (no matter what you do!), and discover a fresh look at how the gospel can transform how you see God, your neighbor, your work, and your world. You’ll return to your biggest and truest story. Your life (and your world) need never be the same.

"Struggling to raise her little brother Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star-gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery"--

A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, People • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Ms. magazine, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews “Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.”—NPR We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

What’s better than a lost treasure? Seven lost treasures! These rarely seen Dr. Seuss stories were published in magazines in the early 1950s and are finally available in book form. They include “The Bippolo Seed” (in which a scheming feline leads a duck toward a bad decision), “The Rabbit, the Bear, and the Zinniga-Zanniga” (about a rabbit who is saved from a bear by a single eyelash), “Gustav, the Goldfish” (an early rhymed version of the Beginner Book A Fish Out of Water), “Tadd and Todd” (about a twin who is striving to be an individual), “Steak for Supper” (in which fantastic creatures follow a boy home in anticipation of a steak dinner), “The Strange Shirt Spot” (the inspiration for the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back), and “The Great Henry McBride” (about a boy whose far-flung career fantasies are bested only by those of Dr. Seuss himself). An introduction by Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen traces the history of the stories, which demonstrate an intentional move toward the writing style we now associate with Dr. Seuss. Cohen also explores the themes that recur in well-known Seuss stories (like the importance of the imagination or the perils of greed). With a color palette enhanced beyond the limitations of the original magazines, this is a collection that no Seuss fan (whether scholar or second grader) will want to miss.

When Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude. Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - 'The way things were' is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart. Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from the past four decades, fusing private and political, classical and contemporary to thrilling effect, this book confirms Aatish Taseer as one of the most arresting voices of his generation.

One cool day in late October, Georgia noticed something weird. Objects would move around the house and sometimes they even disappeared. Now, some people may have wondered (especially at this time of year) if this was the work of something spooky? But not clever Georgia! She has all the explanations and none of the fear! Join her in debunking the spookiest of ghoulish and ghostly mischief in this Halloween adventure!

A family saga--told in a captivating narrative that leaps forwards and backwards in time--of one family's struggle to survive in the rural United States over 100 years. Carol was thirteen when her daddy lost her in a game of cards. One year later--pregnant and with nowhere to go--she is taken in by Bessie and Martha, who run a secret refuge for "lost women." Fifty years on in the same small Kentucky town, Carol's thirteen-year-old grandson rides his BMX and watches wrestling, mesmerized by 1980s excess, while his community fights to stay employed in factories and on farms. Simon Van Booy has woven the many struggles and small triumphs of three generations of a single Kentucky family into an intimate portrayal of American life that includes the Depression, war, faith, the hardship of women, racial prejudice, and rural disenfranchisement. Van Booy captures the distinctive voices of each generation, time and again revealing the sacred bonds of family and friendship in times of crisis. With stark, poetic clarity, Night Came with Many Stars is a captivating journey through one century that reveals an America rarely seen.

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibín 'She suddenly leaned toward the mirror and sought the loveliest way to see herself' Lucrécia Neves is vain, unreflective, insolently superficial, almost mute. She may have no inner life at all. As she morphs from small-town girl to worldly wife of a rich man, and her small home town surrenders to the forces of progress, Lucrécia seeks perfection: to be an object, serene, smooth, beyond the burden of words or even thought itself. A book that obsessed its author, The Besieged City is unlike any other work in Lispector's canon: a story of transformation, of what it means to see and to be seen.

This definitive biography of Vince McMahon, former WWE chairman and CEO, is “riveting, essential reading” (Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author) as it charts his rise from rural poverty to the throne of one of the world’s most influential media empires. Featuring exclusive interviews with more than 150 people who witnessed, aided, and suffered from his ascent. Even if you’ve never watched a minute of professional wrestling, you are living in Vince McMahon’s world. In his four decades as the defining figure of American pro wrestling, McMahon was the man behind Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, John Cena, Dave Bautista, Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and Hulk Hogan, to name just a few of the mega-stars who owe him their careers. For more than twenty-five years, he has also been a performer in his own show, acting as the diabolical “Mr. McMahon”—a figure who may have more in common with the real Vince than he would care to admit. Just as importantly, McMahon is one of Donald Trump’s closest friends—and Trump’s experiences as a performer in McMahon’s programming were, in many ways, a dress rehearsal for the 45th President’s campaigns and presidency. McMahon and his wife, Linda, are major Republican donors. Linda was in Trump’s cabinet. McMahon makes deals with the Saudi government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And for generations of people who have watched wrestling, he has been a defining cultural force and has helped foment “the worst of contemporary politics” (Kirkus Reviews). Ringmaster built on exclusive interviews with more than 150 people, from McMahon’s childhood friends to those who accuse him of destroying their lives. “Smart, entertaining, impressively reported, and beautifully written. Wrestling fans will devour it, but everyone who wants to better understand this crazy country and one of its truly original characters ought to read it” (Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life).