Akron Public Library

After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.

In 1995, Iowa native Bill Bryson took a motoring trip around Britain to explore that green and pleasant land. The uproarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, is one of the most acute portrayals of the United Kingdom ever written. Two decades later, Bryson-now a British citizen-set out again to rediscover his adopted country. In these pages, he follows a straight line through the island-from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath-and shows us every...

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...

Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.

Daisy Bellamy struggled for years to choose between two men, and then, one fateful day, the decision is made for her. Now busy with a thriving business on Willow Lake, Daisy knows she should be happy with the life she's chosen for herself and her son. But she still aches for the one thing she can't have, until the man once lost to her reappears, resurrected by a promise of love. Now the choice Daisy thought was behind her is the hardest one she'll...

When the police tell a wealthy industrialist that her missing son has faked his own kidnapping, she hires Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and Cole soon determines that it was no fake. The boy and his secret girlfriend have been taken, and are now lost in the gray and changing world of the professional border kidnappers who prey not only on innocent victims but also on one another, buying, selling, and stealing victims like commodities. Fortunately, the kidnappers...

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong. Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life....

The unexpected delivery of a large crate containing an Antarctic penguin changes the life and fortunes of Mr. Popper, a house painter obsessed by dreams of the Polar regions.

"Stephen Crane's immortal masterpiece about the nightmare of war was first published in 1895 and brought its young author immediate international fame. Set during the Civil War, it tells of the brutal disillusionment of a young recruit who had dreamed of the thrill and glory of war, only to find himself fleeing the horror of a battlefield. Shame over his cowardice drives him to seek to redeem himself by being wounded -- earning what he calls the "red...

Tally is about to turn sixteen, and she can't wait. In Tally's world, your sixteenth birthday brings an operation that turns you from a repellent ugly into a stunningly attractive pretty and catapults you into a high-tech paradise where your only job is to have a really great time. But Tally's new friend Shay isn't sure she wants to be pretty. When Shay runs away, authorities offer Tally the worst choice she can imagine: find her friend and turn her...