Livia wears a small porcelain hand around her neck, all that is left of a doll that once belonged to her grandmother, but on the first night at summer camp the hand comes alive and terrifies an envious cabinmate--and there are plenty of chills in five other stories in this collection.

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

'A heart-warming story packed with Second World War detail' - Daily Express 'Carrie's War for a new generation of children' - Belfast Telagraph September, 1939: At the breakout of the Second World War , ten-year-old Shirley is sent away on a train. She doesn't know where she's going, or what's going to happen to her when she gets there. All she has been told is that she's going on 'a little holiday'. She soon finds herself lodged deep in the countryside, with two boys from the East End of London, Kevin. But here, living in the strange, half-empty Red House with the mysterious and reclusive Mrs Waverley, the children's lives will be changed for ever. Award-winning, bestselling and beloved author Jacqueline Wilson has created a beautiful, moving story of friendship and bravery against the backdrop of the worst conflict the world has ever known. 'So good, I couldn't put it down.' - Reader review, BookTrust 'The reigning queen of British children's fiction, Jacqueline Wilson, turns to the second World War with Wave Me Goodbye . . .The story handles the balance of big worries - the war - with the smaller details of what it means to be separated from one's family while life still goes on.' - The Irish Times

What if you only had one hundred words to warn humanity of a deadly danger? What if your favorite sci-fi movie suddenly turned into a real-life worst nightmare? What if a girl you've never seen before keeps showing up in photos on your cell phone? What if you hear a knocking sound in the middle of the night? In each of the 27 tales in this book, people are afraid. Very afraid. Read their stories. See if you share their fears. Because if you don't now . . . you will.

In this “witty, perceptive novel”, a young woman moves to Tokyo and encounters the world of university enrollment and impending adulthood (Elle). Banana Yoshimoto’s novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria’s father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a “normal” family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi’s inner strength and the real possibility of losing her. Goodbye Tsugumi is a beguiling, resonant novel from one of the world’s finest young writers.

Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying. Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.

In writing The Rise & Fall of Jimmy Wonderboy I hoped to examine my life and why certain things happened. By the end of the book, which I wrote over the course of a year. (One to three pages at a time while I was alone in my cell.) I would sit quietly, and on an old Brother typewriter, let my mind wander. I noticed during rewrites that I used humor to stop the pain of what I was thinkingof what I had done to my loved ones. I truly hope that after you read this book you will come to the conclusion that we need to address this crisis of abuse and quickly. Not necessarily by locking up the person but by helping the person on a mental-health level. It would be a wiser way to spend taxpayer money and keep the family unit together.

Six-year-old Brandon hates to go up the stairs to bed because there is always a man sitting there, a man only he can see, but tonight he closes his eyes and makes the climb with his mother watching, and then he hears his mother scream--and that is only one of the stories in this collection about all-too-real fears.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Sandra Kring's A Life of Bright Ideas. Wisconsin, 1961. Evelyn “Button” Peters is nine the summer Winnalee and her fiery-spirited older sister, Freeda, blow into her small town–and from the moment she sees them, Button knows this will be a summer unlike any other. Much to her mother’s dismay, Button is fascinated by the Malone sisters, especially Winnalee, a feisty scrap of a thing who carries around a shiny silver urn containing her mother’s ashes and a tome she calls “The Book of Bright Ideas.” It is here, Winnalee tells Button, that she records everything she learns: her answers to the mysteries of life. But sometimes those mysteries conceal a truth better left buried. And when a devastating secret is suddenly revealed, dividing loyalties and uprooting lives, no one–from Winnalee and her sister to Button and her family–will ever be the same.

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