It’s the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk. As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be—in surprising moments of generosity and grace.

While she strolls, Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America—a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown.

A love letter to city life—however shiny or sleazy—Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.

By the Shores of Silver Lake continues the adventurous journey of Laura Ingalls and her family as they move from their little house on the banks of Plum Creek to the wilderness of the unsettled Dakota Territory. Here, Pa works on the new railroad until he finds a homestead claim that is perfect for their new little house.

Laura takes her first train ride as she, her sisters, and their mother come out to live with Pa on the shores of Silver Lake. After a lonely winter in the surveyors' house, Pa puts up the first building in what will soon be a brand-new town on the beautiful shores of Silver Lake. The Ingallses' covered-wagon travels are finally over.

Sent by her family to work in a silk factory just prior to World War II, young Pei grows to womanhood, working fifteen-hour days and sending her pay to the family who abandoned her.

In "Women of the Silk", Gail Tsukiyama takes her readers back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amidst the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own.

Tsukiyama's graceful prose weaves the details of "the silk work" and Chinese village life into a story of courage and strength.

In Rain of Gold, Victor Villaseñor weaves the parallel stories of two families and two countries, bringing us the timeless romance between the volatile bootlegger who would become his father and the beautiful Lupe, his mother. These are men and women in whose lives the real and the fantastical exist side by side, and in whose hearts the spirit to survive is fueled by a family’s unconditional love.

This non-fiction saga is an all-American story of poverty, immigration, struggle, and success. It focuses on three generations of the Villaseñor family, their spiritual and cultural roots back in Mexico, their immigration to California, and their overcoming of poverty, prejudice, and economic exploitation.

A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.

Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soul-mate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.

In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present. As his characters struggle for survival, Michener weaves together the exciting high points of Alaska’s story: its brutal origins, the American acquisition, the gold rush, the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry, and the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway, undertaken to defend the territory during World War II.

A spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic saga of the enduring spirit of a land and its people.

Twelve-year-old Matt is left on his own in the Maine wilderness while his father leaves to bring the rest of the family to their new settlement. When he befriends Attean, an Indian chief's grandson, he is invited to join the Beaver tribe and move north. Should Matt abandon his hopes of ever seeing his family again and go on to a new life?

Although he faces responsibility bravely, Matt is more than a little apprehensive when his father leaves him alone to guard their new cabin in the wilderness. When a renegade white stranger steals his gun, Matt realizes he has no way to shoot game or to protect himself. When Matt meets Attean, a boy in the Beaver clan, he begins to better understand their way of life and their growing problem in adapting to the white man and the changing frontier.

Elizabeth George Speare’s survival story is filled with wonderful detail about living in the wilderness and the relationships that formed between settlers and natives in the 1700s.

Follow Sir Gibbie on his adventures through the moors of Scotland's Highlands more than a century ago. Having no mother and an alcoholic father, Gibbie must survive on the streets as a child unable to read or speak. See how this boy wins the hearts of his neighbors and offers what little he has to help others.

Sir Gibbie teaches adults and children alike about the ability to sacrifice self, and to strive for a world more honest and pure than our own.