National Network for Equitable Library Service

Bo Mason, his wife, and two boys live a transient life of poverty, drifting from place to place, seeking a living. The conflict between the hardscrabble existence and Bo's pursuit of the American dream gives the book great resonance and power. 

Drawing on contemporary accounts, period photographs, dime novels and his own fund of empathy and imagination, Michael Ondaatje traces Billy the Kid's passage across the blasted landscape of 1880s New Mexico and the collective unconscious of his country.

During one monumental month in 1848, gold is discovered in California, the United States wins its first foreign war, rebellion erupts throughout Europe, and an eager English gentleman named Benjamin Knowles plunges into love with the strong-minded New York actress and part-time prostitute Polly Lucking. He also meets her brother Duff, a dangerously damaged veteran of the Mexican War, and befriends the unforgettable Timothy Skaggs--journalist, daguerrotypist, mischief maker, stargazer.

As an orphaned child, Mike Bastian was taken in by the legendary outlaw Ben Curry and raised to one day take over his empire of crime. Today that day has come, and Mike must decide whether to follow the path set before him.

With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as Argus, North Dakota, where he settles, building a business and a home for his family, which now includes Eva and four sons, and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.

Meet Faye Quick, a sassy secretary who keeps the home fires burning by reluctantly becoming a private investigator after her boss and agency owner, Woody Mason, joins the army. True to her name, Faye catches on quick, and is especially adept at solving crimes--notably when she stumbles (quite literally) over the body of a murdered woman. This accidental discovery not only forces Faye to keep the doors of the agency open during wartime, it keeps them swinging.

A pampered child used to having her own way, Anneke Van Raalte lives outside Amsterdam, where her father is a cartoonist for the Amsterdam newspaper. Though Anneke's family is Jewish, her religion means little to her. Anneke's life changes in 1942 when the Nazis invade Holland, and she and her family are deported to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Set during the last year of the American Civil War, this grim portrayal of the brutality of war through the eyes of a young soldier, Jake Clay as he joins the Union Army in the spring of 1864, determined to make his parents proud. His dreams of glory vanish, however, when he is wounded and taken prisoner in his first battle at Cold Harbor, Virginia, and confined to the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, where 30,000 soldiers face violence, disease and starvation.

On her seventh birthday, Pauline rode across the lawns on her street followed by her best friend Henry, he on the blue wooden horse, she on the red. On the seventh lawn at the top of the street, she collapsed, becoming a sudden victim of the polio outbreak of the summer of 1954.Five years later, when In the Clear begins, she has survived, but paid a heavy price. A brace on her left leg allows her to walk, but she confines herself to her house, humiliated at the notion of being seen.

In the fall of 1066, a thirteen-year-old Anglo-Saxon girl named Catla watches from afar as Viking raiders burn her village and imprison her family and the other villagers. No one sees her as she flees toward Aigber, the closest village, praying the people there will help. Catla must ignore her terror as she makes her way to the standing stones, a place of refuge, where she meets Sven, an older boy from her village. Together, they continue toward Aigber and are able to alert the village of the coming peril.