National Network for Equitable Library Service

A fourteen-year-old Eskimo boy who feels assailed by the modernity of his life takes a 1400-mile journey by dog sled across ice, tundra, and mountains seeking his own "song" of himself.

In the early 1960s, twelve-year-old songwriter Livy Two Weems dreams of seeing the world beyond the Maggie Valley, North Carolina, holler where she lives in poverty with her parents and eight brothers and sisters, but understands that she must put family first.

Jin-Han describes his life growing up with his mother and father, immigrants from Korea, and his little sister as they move to different cities with his parents' business.

Detective novel. Portrays Germany as it might have looked twenty years after winning World War II.

Booker Prize winner. The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute.

Sripathi Rao, the protagonist of Anita Rau Badami's second novel, is an ordinary, middle-aged man whose career and family have failed to meet his expectations. But when his daughter and her husband are suddenly killed in a car crash, his world and his priorities turn upside down. Set in a small town in the Bay of Bengal during a time of cultural change, The Hero's Walk is a lyrical, affecting story about the complexity of family ties.

The Hero's Walk won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, Caribbean and Canada.