Highly Commended by the Sheffield Children's Book Award 2010. Lauren and her aunt and uncle are returning to London after years living away in Cornwall. For Lauren it is a return to the sight of a terrible family tragedy and a house full of ghosts. When she was six years old her mum and little sister were murdered in their home ... and Lauren's dad was put in prison for the crime. Now she is living a stone's throw from her old house, and despite her trepidation, Lauren is curious to know who lives there now, and how the house will make her feel. When she becomes friendly with Nathan, the son of the new owners, she finds herself back at the scene of so many nightmares...of memories, but also of things forgotten. Lauren blocked out a lot of that fateful day, but now that she's older, things are coming back to her...things that could mean her dad is innocent, not guilty of murder. After all these years of hating him Lauren now faces the prospect of loving her dad once again. But is it that easy?

Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer. Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer conceived Cane as a mosaic of intricately connected vignettes, poems, stories, songs, and even play-like dialogues. Drawing on both modernist poetry and African-American spirituals, Toomer imbues each form with a lyrical and often experimental sensibility. The work is structured in three distinct but unnamed parts. The first is set in rural Georgia and focuses on the lives of women and the men who desire them. The second part moves to the urban enclaves of the North in the years following the Great Migration. The third and final part returns to the rural South and explores the interactions between African-Americans from the North and those living in the South. Although sales languished in the later years of Toomer’s life, the book was reissued after his death and rediscovered by a new generation of American writers. Alice Walker described Cane as one of the most important books in her own development as a writer: “I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.” This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Something is killing the people of Comanche. In 1887 near the tiny Texas town of Comanche, a posse finally ends the murderous career of The Piney Woods Kid in a hail of bullets. Still in the grip of blood-lust, the vigilantes hack the Kid’s corpse to bits in the dead house behind the train depot. The people of Comanche rejoice. Justice has been done. A long bloody chapter in the town’s history is over. The year is now 2016. Comanche police are stymied by a double murder at the train depot. Witnesses swear the killer was dressed like an old-time gunslinger. Rumors fly that it’s the ghost of The Piney Woods Kid, back to wreak revenge on the descendants of the vigilantes who killed him. Help arrives in the form of a team of investigators from New Orleans. Shunned by the local community and haunted by their own pasts, they’re nonetheless determined to unravel the mystery. They follow the evidence and soon find themselves in the crosshairs of the killer. -- Brett Riley

Welcome to the Dead House. Three students: dead. Carly Johnson: vanished without a trace. Two decades have passed since an inferno swept through Elmbridge High, claiming the lives of three teenagers and causing one student, Carly Johnson, to disappear. The main suspect: Kaitlyn, "the girl of nowhere." Kaitlyn's diary, discovered in the ruins of Elmbridge High, reveals the thoughts of a disturbed mind. Its charred pages tell a sinister version of events that took place that tragic night, and the girl of nowhere is caught in the center of it all. But many claim Kaitlyn doesn't exist, and in a way, she doesn't - because she is the alter ego of Carly Johnson. Carly gets the day. Kaitlyn has the night. It's during the night that a mystery surrounding the Dead House unravels and a dark, twisted magic ruins the lives of each student that dares touch it. Debut author Dawn Kurtagich masterfully weaves together a thrilling and terrifying story using psychiatric reports, witness testimonials, video footage, and the discovered diary – and as the mystery grows, the horrifying truth about what happened that night unfolds.

Jean Toomer’s revolutionary masterpiece Cane (1923) ushered in the era we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, and has come to be considered one of the classic works of American literary modernism. A boldly experimental “novel” mixing prose, poetry, and dramatic sketches, the book’s hallmark is its formal sophistication; sexuality, racism, and industrialization are among its major themes. Above all else it offers unforgettably evocative portraits of the African American lives Toomer encountered in rural Georgia, by turns down-to-earth, heartfelt, hauntingly lyrical.

THE STORY: As told by Chapman from the NY Daily News: Wirz, a Swiss immigrant and a doctor, had enlisted in the rebel army, had been severely wounded and, a semi-invalid, had been put in command of this military prison. It was merely a stockade wi

“A breakthrough in prose and poetical writing. . . . This book should be on all readers’ and writers’ desks and in their minds.”—Maya Angelou First published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane is an innovative literary work—part drama, part poetry, part fiction—powerfully evoking black life in the South. Rich in imagery, Toomer’s impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic sketches of Southern rural and urban life are permeated by visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and fire; the northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. This iconic work of American literature is published with a new afterword by Rudolph Byrd of Emory University and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University, who provide groundbreaking biographical information on Toomer, place his writing within the context of American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and examine his shifting claims about his own race and his pioneering critique of race as a scientific or biological concept.