Twelve year-old Douglas Spaulding spends a magical small-town summer in 1928 Green Town, Illinois in 1928.

In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities.

From the acclaimed author of The Boys of My Youth and Festival Days, a “mesmerizing… beautifully written” debut novel that evokes the wrenching, exquisite moment just before we step into adulthood (Ann Patchett).
The fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She flies under the radar — a sidekick, a marching-band dropout, a disastrous babysitter. Luckily,...

"In a summer that refuses to end, in the deceiving warmth of earliest October, civil war has come to Green Town, Illinois. It is the age-old conflict: the young against the elderly, for control of the clock that ticks their lives ever forward. The first cap-pistol shot heard 'round the town is dead accurate, felling an old man in his tracks, compelling town elder and school board despot Mr. Calvin C. Quartermain to marshal his graying forces and declare...

When Abby's first letter arrives at a small school in Afghanistan, Sadeed Bayat is chosen to be her pen pal...well, kind of. He is the best writer, but he is also a boy, and in his village it is not appropriate for a boy to correspond with a girl. So his younger sister dictates and signs the letter, until Sadeed decides what his sister is telling Abby isn't what he'd like Abby to know. As letters go back and forth between Illinois and Afghanistan,...

Ruth, a young woman living in a rural Illinois town, looks back on the people who have shaped her life, including her runaway father, shrewish mother, and crazy husband.

Popular television personality Valerie Adler turns to her long-forgotten, Illinois hometown friend Addie Downs when she runs into a bit of trouble involving betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets.

When her husband, Ben, drags her to the States for a gourmet cooking competition, the nervous and pregnant Ellie Haskell encounters mystery and murder in the American Midwest.

Rayford Steele and Cameron "Buck" Williams find themselves pressed into service for the man they believe could be the Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia takes over the United Nations, signs a peace treaty with Israel, and begins to lure the nations of earth together to form one global village. As believers band together following the Rapture, their peaceful world is destroyed again when global war erupts. A repackage of the New York Times best-selling...

While working on a project for an after-school club, Julia, a Korean American girl, and her friend Patrick learn not just about silkworms, but also about tolerance, prejudice, friendship, patience, and more. Between the chapters are short dialogues between the author and main character about the writing of the book.