The Winter Place

Upon their father’s death, Tess and her younger brother, Axel, leave New York for their grandparents’ home in Finland, where they learn that a bear they both saw is the spirit of their mother, the strange man with her is the keeper of souls, and he wants Axel, already plagued with the disease that killed their mother, to replace him.

Ticket To India

When twelve-year-old Maya and big sister Zara set off on their own from Delhi to their grandmother’s home of Aminpur, a small town in Northern India, they become separated and Maya decides to continue their quest to find a chest of family treasures that their grandmother’s family left behind when they fled from India to Pakistan during the Great Partition.

The Cat At The Wall

When normal American middle-school student Clare dies and comes back as a cat in the middle of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, she wonders if she should even try to do what she can to help since, after all, she is just a cat. A cat sneaks into a small Palestinian house on the West Bank that has been commandeered by two Israeli soldiers. The house seems empty, until the cat realizes that a little boy is hiding beneath the floorboards.

The Lightning Queen

On the Hill of Dust, in the remote mountains of Mexico, an eleven-year-old Mixtec boy called Teo lives with his family and the animals that he has healed, but one day a Romany caravan rolls into town with a young girl who calls herself Esma, the Gypsy Queen of Lightning–it is the beginning of a life-long friendship that will change both their lives.

An Inuksuk Means Welcome

An inuksuk is a stone landmark that different peoples of the Arctic region build to leave a symbolic message. Inuksuit (the plural of inuksuk) can point the way, express joy, or simply say: welcome. A central image in Inuit culture, the inuksuk frames this picture book as an acrostic: readers will learn seven words from the Inuktitut language whose first letters together spell INUKSUK. Each word is presented in English and in Inuktitut characters, with phonetic pronunciation guides provided.

The Green Bicycle

Spunky eleven-year-old Wadjda lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with her parents. She desperately wants a bicycle so that she can race her friend Abdullah, even though it is considered improper for girls to ride bikes. Wadjda earns money for her dream bike by selling homemade bracelets and mixtapes of banned music to her classmates.

Mike’s Place

There’s a rule at Mike’s Place: never, ever talk politics or religion. At this blues bar on the Tel Aviv beachfront, an international cast of characters mingles with the locals, and everyone is welcome to grab a beer and forget the conflict outside. At least, that’s the story Jack and Joshua want to tell in their documentary. But less than a month after they begin filming, Mike’s Place is the target of a deadly suicide bombing. Mike’s Place chronicles the true story of an infamous terrorist attack in painstaking detail. Rarely has the slow build to tragedy, and the rebirth that follows, been captured with such a compassionate and unflinching eye.

The Second Guard

In the peaceful realm of Tequende, all second-born children at the age of fifteen must journey to the Alcazar to fulfill the mandate of the Oath of Guilds. While training to join the ranks of the Queen’s legendary army, the Second Guard, fifteen-year-old Talimendra and her new friends Zarif and Chey discover a conspiracy that could bring down the entire Tequendian Empire.

A Thousand Nights

Lo-Melkhiin killed three hundred girls before he came to her village, so when she is taken to the king’s dangerous court she believes death will soon follow, but night after night Lo-Melkhiin comes to her and listens to the stories she tells, leading her to unlocking years of fear that have tormented and silenced the kingdom, and soon she is dreaming of bigger, more terrible magic, power enough to save a king, if she can put an end to rule of a monster.

Trail Of The Dead

In the sequel to Killer of Enemies, Apache teen Lozen and her family are looking for a place of refuge from the despotic Ones who once held them captive and forced Lozen to hunt genetically engineered monsters. Lozen and her allies travel in search of a valley where she and her family once found refuge. But life is never easy in this post-apocalyptic world.