Told through the voice of an overweight 13-year-old boy named Shuggy Atkins, this is the story of Shug; the one person who loves him, his mother Glenda; and her boyfriend Red, a brutal and ignorant man. Red hates Shug but uses him to break into houses to steal drugs and anything else that can be sold. Glenda makes a meager living looking after the local cemetery and spends her time trying to keep Red amused and away from Shug, whom he loves to humiliate...

Trying to be a perfect student and friend is hard enough, but when Rachel develops a crush on her brother's tutor and lands a surprise date with Jeremy, she worries that she may be in over her head.

In small-town Australia, teens Jasper and Charlie form an unlikely friendship when one asks the other to help him cover up a murder until they can prove who is responsible.

When Raymie enters the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition in hopes of catching her father?s attention, she doesn?t expect to become friends with her sassy and eccentric fellow contestants, Louisiana and Beverly. But as time goes by, these three girls become allies and soon learn that even your biggest rivals can turn out to be your closest friends.

Sixteen-year-old Nomi struggles not to give in to despair when her mother and sister flee their home in East Village, a Mennonite community in Manitoba, leaving her in the care of her increasingly depressed father.

Ruth loves to bake cakes. When she is alone, she dreams up variations on recipes. When she meditates, she imagines herself in the warm, comforting center of a gigantic bundt cake. If there is a crisis, she bakes a cake; if there is a reason to celebrate, she bakes a cake. Ruth sees it as an outward manifestation of an inner need to nurture her family—which is a good thing, because all of a sudden that family is rapidly expanding. First, her...

As he is dying, a twenty-year-old man known as Gabriel recounts his troubled childhood and his strange relationship with a dangerous counterpart named Finnigan.

Evie's stepfather returns home from WWII and brings more back with him than war stories. When an ex-GI who had served with her stepdad in postwar Austria shows up, Evie is caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. Winner of the National Book Award. "Greer paces the story perfectly, drawing out each scene, pulling each character into the drama." -- AudioFile

Prince stars as "The Kid," a Minneapolis club musician, who struggles with both a tumultous homelife and his own smoldering anger while taking refuge in his music and his steamy love for sultry Apollonia Kotero. Semi-autobiographical.