A heart-racing middle-grade adventure mystery set on the streets of Singapore against the backdrop of World War II, exploring issues of belonging, race and diversity

Holbrook the lizard has an artist's soul, but when his paintings are ridiculed by the owls, geckoes, and other creatures in his desert town, he decides to seek his fortune in the big city, unaware of the dangers of urban life.

"At the center of The Lizard's Tale is Antonio Muñoz-Roa, a prominent painter whose circumstances bear a striking resemblance to Donoso's own when he wrote the novel. Hiding in his Barcelona apartment, obsessed with the ruins of his past, Muñoz-Roa relates the story of his flight to the small town of Dors with Luisa, his cousin, lover, and benefactor, after his scandalous defection from the 'Informalist' movement (an ironic reference to a contemporary Catalan art movement and possibly also a veiled allusion to the boom)."--P. [2] of jacket.

A lonely boy’s new pet grows into a rather large dilemma—and a Thanksgiving parade offers an uplifting solution—in this charming tale from the author of The Boy and the Airplane and The Girl and the Bicycle. When Leonard takes a shortcut through the park, he finds an egg and takes it home, where it hatches into a lizard (or so Leonard thinks). Leonard names his new pet Buster and takes him all around the city: on the subway, to the library, to a baseball game, and more. But Buster keeps growing and growing—and Leonard gets the sense that Buster is longing for something Leonard can’t provide. Before long, Buster becomes too big to keep, and Leonard realizes he needs to set Buster free. So Leonard comes up with an inventive plan, one that involves all the balloons Leonard can find and the annual Thanksgiving parade, in an imaginative plot twist that will spark readers’ imaginations—and touch their hearts.

Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over five decades and six continents. In 1965, Hank Molt, a young cheese salesman from Philadelphia, reinvented himself as a “specialist dealer in rare fauna,” traveling the world to collect exquisite reptiles for zoos and museums. By the end of the decade that followed, new endangered species laws had turned Molt into a convicted smuggler, and an unrepentant one, who went on to provide many of the same rare reptiles to many of the same institutions, covertly. But Molt soon found a rival in Tommy Crutchfield, a Florida carpet salesman with every intention of usurping Molt as the most accomplished reptile smuggler in the country. Like Molt, Crutchfield had modeled himself after an earlier generation of natural-history collectors celebrated for their service to science, an ideal that, for Molt and Crutchfield, eclipsed the realities of the new wildlife-protection laws. Zoo curators, caught between a desire for rare animals and the conservation-minded focus of their institutions, became the smugglers’ antagonists in court but also their best customers, sometimes simultaneously. Crutchfield forged ties with a criminally inclined Malaysian wildlife trader and emerged a millionaire, beloved by some of the finest zoos in the world. Molt, following a string of inventive but disastrous smuggling schemes in New Guinea, was reduced to hanging around Crutchfield’s Florida compound, plotting Crutchfield’s demise. The fallout from their feud would result in a major federal investigation with tentacles in Germany, Madagascar, Holland, and Malaysia. And yet even after prison, personal ruin, and the depredations of age, Molt and Crutchfield never stopped scheming, never stopped longing for the snake or lizard that would earn each his rightful place in a world that had forgotten them—or rather, had never recognized them to begin with.

Ananse the spider thinks he will marry the daughter of the village chief, but instead he is outsmarted by Lizard.

A story by Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago, gorgeously illustrated in woodcuts by one of Brazil's most famous artists. When a lizard appears in the neighborhood of Chiado, in Lisbon, it surprises passers-by, and mobilizes firefighters and the army. With a clear and precise style, the fable offers a multitude of senses, reaching audiences of all ages. "The Lizard" is a short story included in A Bagagem do Viajante (1973), a volume that brought together the Saramago chronicles for the newspaper A Capital and the weekly Jornal do Fundão between 1971 and 1972. Translated by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor, The Lizard, is an illustrated version of the chronicle by J. Borges.

Contains a graphic novel that presents a fictionalized historical tale of two late-nineteenth century scientists who fight over the discovery of dinosaur bones.

An ALA Notable Book Kids ages 9-12 will “delight in [the] oddness” of this Home Alone-style tale set in the 1970s—from a prolific children’s author who captures “a magic that’s not like anyone else’s” (Neil Gaiman). With Victor’s parents out of town, he is free to investigate the mysterious lizard musicians who have recently appeared on TV . . . Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor has plenty of time to indulge himself and to try a few things he’s been curious about. Exploring the nearby city of Hogboro, he runs into a curious character known as the Chicken Man (a reference to his companion, an intelligent hen named Claudia who lives under his hat). The Chicken Man speaks brilliant nonsense, but he seems to be hip to the lizard musicians (real lizards, not men in lizard suits) who’ve begun appearing on Victor’s television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Are the lizards from outer space? From “other space”? Together Victor and the Chicken Man, guided by the able Claudia, journey to the lizards’ floating island, a strange and fantastic place that operates with an inspired logic of its own.