Out of Shadows

A debut novel set in the early 1980s at a boy’s boarding school in the newly formed country of Zimbabwe.

Terezin

Through inmates’ own voices and artwork, Terezin explores the lives of Jewish people in one of the most infamous of the Nazi transit camps. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany turned the small town of Terezin, Czechoslovakia, into a ghetto, and then into a transit camp for thousands of Jewish people. It was a “show” camp, where inmates were forced to use their artistic talents to fool the world about the truth of gas chambers and horrific living conditions for imprisoned Jews. Here is their story, told through the firsthand accounts of those who were there. In this accessible, meticulously researched book, Ruth Thomson allows the inmates to speak for themselves through secret diary entries, artwork, and excerpts from memoirs and recordings narrated after the war. Terezin: Voices from the Holocaust is a moving portrait that shows the strength of the human will to endure, to create, and to survive.

Anya’s War

In 1937, the privileged and relatively carefee life of a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, whose family emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, to Shanghai, China, comes to an end when she finds an abandoned baby, her hero, Amelia Earhart, goes missing, and war breaks out with Japan. Based on the author’s family history.

Belize

“Provides comprehensive information on the geography, history, wildlife, governmental structure, economy, cultural diversity, peoples, religion, and culture of Belize”–Provided by publisher.

Trinidad and Tobago

“Provides comprehensive information on the geography, history, wildlife, governmental structure, economy, cultural diversity, peoples, religion, and culture of Trinidad and Tobago”–Provided by publisher.

Hurricane Dancers

Quebrado has been traded from pirate ship to ship in the Caribbean Sea for as long as he can remember. The sailors he toils under call him el quebrado—half islander, half outsider, a broken one. Now the pirate captain Bernardino de Talavera uses Quebrado as a translator to help navigate the worlds and words between his mother’s Taíno Indian language and his father’s Spanish. But when a hurricane sinks the ship and most of its crew, it is Quebrado who escapes to safety. He learns how to live on land again, among people who treat him well. And it is he who must decide the fate of his former captors.

Nothing

“Nothing matters.” “From the moment you are born, you start to die.” “The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. You’ll live to be a maximum of one hundred. Life isn’t worth the bother!” So says Pierre Anthon when he decides that there is no meaning to life, leaves the classroom, climbs a plum tree, and stays there.His friends and classmates cannot get him to come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to him that there is a meaning to life, they set out to build a heap of meaning in an abandoned sawmill. But it soon becomes obvious that each person cannot give up what is most meaningful, so they begin to decide for one another what the others must give up. The pile is started with a lifetime’s collection of Dungeons & Dragons books, a fishing rod, a pair of green sandals, a pet hamster — but then, as each demand becomes more extreme, things start taking a very morbid twist, and the kids become ever more desperate to get Pierre Anthon down. And what if, after all these sacrifices, the pile is not meaningful enough? A Lord of the Flies for the twenty-first century, Nothing is a visionary existential novel — about everything, and nothing — that will haunt you.