Cast out of the city of Agora where they were left at the end of The Midnight Charter, Mark and Lily must now survive in a dense forest. The strange villages, terrifying nightmares, and powerful witches they find there are even more frightening than Agora with all its slums and secrets. In an adventure that expands with every turn of the page, David Whitley delivers a novel as thrilling and horrifying as his characters' darkest dreams.
Twelve-year-old Josephine Russing lives alone with her father. Mr. Russing is a distant, cold man best known for his insistence that every member of their town wear gloves at all times, just as he does--even at home--and just as he forces his daughter to do as well. Then one day Josephine meets a boy named Fargus. But when she tries to follow him, he mysteriously disappears and Josephine finds herself in another world called Gulm. Gulm is ruled by the "Master," a terrifying villain who has taken all the children of Gulm. With Fargus by her side, and joined by Fargus's friend Ida, Josephine must try to find her way home. As the trio attempt to evade the Master, they encounter numerous adventures and discover the surprising truth about the land of Gulm, and Josephine's own life back home.
NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.
In 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young civil liberties attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. Lowry’s contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood had been shaped by the system’s inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to the same failing system. Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby. She was told by child-welfare officials that Shirley had disappeared and that her son was one of thousands of anonymous children whose circumstances are concealed by the veil of confidentiality that hides foster care from public scrutiny. But Bernstein persevered. The Lost Children of Wilder gives us, in galvanizing and compulsively readable detail, the full history of a case that reveals the racial, religious, and political fault lines in our child-welfare system, and lays bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our well-intended efforts to sever the destiny of needy children from the fate of their parents. Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, at the same time as she traces, in heartbreaking counterpoint, the consequences as they are played out in the life of Shirley’s son, Lamont. His terrifying journey through the system has produced a man with deep emotional wounds, a stifled yearning for family, and a son growing up in the system’s shadow. In recounting the failure of the promise of benevolence, The Lost Children of Wilder makes clear how welfare reform can also damage its intended beneficiaries. A landmark achievement of investigative reporting and a tour de force of social observation, this book will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.
Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.
Salisbury, 1226 When a child of village outcasts disappears from Salisbury, the odious new sheriff doesn’t seem to care. Ela is determined to help the girl’s desperate parents, and her investigation leads her into the thick of a human trafficking ring in London. There, she vows to find the lost child, arrest the perpetrators, and convince the king to make her High Sheriff of Wiltshire. The Ela of Salisbury Medieval Mystery Series This series features a real historical figure—the formidable Ela Longespée. The young Countess of Salisbury was chosen to marry King Henry II’s illegitimate son William. After her husband’s untimely death, Ela served as High Sheriff of Wiltshire, castellan of Salisbury Castle, and ultimately founder and abbess of Lacock Abbey. The Ela of Salisbury Medieval Mystery series: Book 1: Cathedral of Bones Book 2: Breach of Faith Book 3: The Lost Child Book 4: Forest of Souls Book 5: The Bone Chess Set Book 6: Cloister of Whispers Coming 2022: Book 7: Palace of Thorns
Originally published in 1989. The extraordinary story of Britain’s child migrants is one of 350 years of shaming exploitation. Around 130,000 children, some just 3 or 4 years old, were shipped off to distant parts of the Empire, the last as recently as 1967. For Britain it was a cheap way of emptying children’s homes and populating the colonies with ‘good British stock’; for the colonies it was a source of cheap labour. Even after the Second World War around 10,000 children were transported to Australia – where many were subjected to at best uncaring abandonment, and at worst a regime of appalling cruelty. Lost Children of the Empire tells the remarkable story of the Child Migrants Trust, set up in 1987, to trace families and to help those involved to come to terms with what has happened. But nothing can explain away the connivance and irresponsibility of the governments and organisations involved in this inhuman chapter of British history.
The “stunning conclusion” to the bestselling saga of the fierce lifelong bond between two women, from a gritty Naples childhood through old age (Publishers Weekly, starred review). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century The Story of the Lost Child concludes the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila, who first met amid the shambles of postwar Italy. In this book, life’s great discoveries have been made; its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet, somehow, this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief. “Lila is a magnificent character.” —The Atlantic “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.” —The Boston Globe
