Alexie, Sherman
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Junior is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. After being suspended, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Junior tells his honest and funny tale of being torn between two worlds.

Dessen, Sarah
Just Listen
Last year, Annabel was "the girl who has everything.” This year, she has no best friend because Sophie dropped her, no peace at home since her older sister became anorexic,
and no one to sit with at lunch. Enter Owen Armstrong, a reformed bad boy with a commitment to truth-telling. With Owen’s help, maybe Annabel can face what happened the night she and Sophie stopped being friends.

McCarthy, Cormac
The Road
Civilization is over. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this story follows a man and his son as they desperately try to navigate a burned out, desolate landscape. Much more than an apocalyptic tale of survival, The Road describes a journey in which we all are can relate: how our humanity drives us to search for something and somewhere hopeful.

Alegría, Malín
Estrella’s Quinceañera

Estrella believes a quinceañera, the Mexican custom of celebrating a girl's 15th birthday, is "just a lame party with cheesy music and puffy princess dresses." How can she have one when she has ignored her old friends since winning a scholarship to a private school? Her new, affluent friends, would only mock the tradition. Life would also be easier if she weren't attracted to a boy who both her family and new friends find unacceptable.

Klass, David
Firestorm
High schooler Jack Danielson was always advised to blend in and not try too hard. But then he learns how he is different: he is from the future and has been sent back to save the planet. In this eco-fantasy Sci-Fi thriller, Jack must act fast even as he is hunted. His only allies are in Gisco, a huge dog who speaks to him telepathically, and Eko, a ninja with ambiguous loyalties. This is Book One in the Caretaker Trilogy.

Martel, Yann
The Life of Pi
“I will tell you a story that will make you believe in God.” So begins a magical tale about 16 year old Pi Patel whose family perishes at sea leaving him alone in a lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Recounting his 227 days at sea with Richard Parker is a total adventure, endurance test and ultimately a test of faith.

Bennett, Alan
The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
What happens when Queen Elizabeth II wanders into a mobile library van in pursuit of her runaway corgis and into the reflective, observant life of an avid reader? Guided by Norman, a former kitchen boy and book enthusiast, the queen gradually loses interest in her endless succession of official duties and learns the pleasure of such a common activity. With the dawn of her sensibility... mistaken for the onset of senility, plots are hatched by the prime minister and the queen's staff to dispatch Norman and discourage
the queen's preoccupation with books.

Brooks, Martha
Mistik Lake
“ We are all related, one way or another, if you go far enough back…” 17-year old Odella tries to unravel the secrets of three generations of women in her family: her great Aunt, her mother who ran off with a lover, and her two sisters. Past family summers spent at Mistik Lake unfold and Odella discovers that love, life, and people are more complicated than we can ever imagine.

Sheth, Kashmira
Koyal Dark, Mango Sweet
This Mumbai-based coming of age story follows sixteen-year-old Jeeta. One of three daughters, Jeeta’s mother is consumed with arranging their marriages, and fears that
Jeeta's dark skin and smart mouth will turn off prospective grooms. But the teen's new friend, Sarina, opens her eyes to other possibilities. Jeeta balances tradition with modernity, family expectations with her dreams for a vivid slice on Mumbai life.

McCaughrean, Geraldine
The White Darkness
Fourteen-year-old Symone is fascinated with the Antarctic and the men who explored it. So when her Uncle Victor whisks the painfully shy, hearing-impaired teen away on a surprise trip to the South Pole, it seems like a dream come true. But Victor has his own agenda, obsessed with exploring legendary Symmes's Hole, portal to the interior of a hollow Earth. Their journey to “the Ice” takes captivating and frightening turns that test Sym’s will to survive in a desolate, frozen place.

Morrison, Toni
The Bluest Eye
Nobel Prize winning author Morrison penned this story in 1970. It tells the tale of 11 year-old Pecola Breedlove – a black girl in an America whose love for blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others –who prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.

Sijie, Dai
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
During China’s Cultural Revolution, two boys are sentenced to a remote village where the peasants make them cart buckets of excrement up and down steep mountain paths. Their meager and forbidden distractions include: a violin, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor, and a hidden stash of Western classics translated into Chinese. After telling the little seamstress tales by Balzac, they will change her life forever.