To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety. To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. A...

Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe become involved with unearthly strangers and a search for Meg's father, who has disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government.

The U.S. Secretary of State is going to a meeting in Libya when her plane crashes. The CIA hires Juan Cabrillo, a unidexter, to search for her. The crew locates the plane, but the Secretary of State has vanished. But what does it all have to do with a two-hundred-year-old naval battle? What are the ancient Islamic scrolls the Libyans seem so determined to find? The search for answers leads Cabrillo into another pitched battle at sea -- this time against...

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their hometown: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw--and felt--what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing ... The adults, knowing better, knew nothing....

On his first night with Detroit PD, Officer Walter O'Brien is called to a murder scene. A terrified twenty-year-old has bludgeoned her kidnapper with skill that shocks even O'Brien's veteran partner. The young woman is also a brilliant escape artist. Her bold flight from police custody makes the case impossible to solve, and, for Walter, even more impossible to forget. By the time Walter's promoted to detective, his fascination with the missing, gray-eyed...

"Soviet Union in 1973, there is perhaps no greater honor for a young girl than to be chosen to be part of the famed USSR gymnastics program. So when eight-year-old Anya is tapped, her family is thrilled. What is left of her family, that is. Years ago her mother disappeared. Anya's only confidant is her neighbor, an older woman who survived unspeakable horrors during her ten years in a Gulag camp--and who, unbeknownst to Anya, was also her mother's...

Darkus Cuttle has taken care of his father ever since his mother died, but one day his father vanished from a locked vault at the Natural History Museum, and now he lives with his eccentric uncle--but one day he finds a large and unusually intelligent and self-aware beetle, and soon he and his two friends are caught up in a struggle to protect an intelligent super species of beetles.

Relates the exploits of the four Alden children as they locate a missing man. "Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny used to live alone in a boxcar. Now they have a home with their grandfather and are determined to solve the mystery that surrounds an old yellow house on his property. Strange things have happened in that house where long ago a man disappeared. When the Boxcar Children explore the house, they find an old letter written by the brother of...

Struggling with trauma in the years following World War I, veteran Lawrence Bartram arrives in the village of Easton Deadall and is embroiled in a dangerous case involving a murdered woman who may be linked to the disappearance of a child years earlier.

It's 1964 in Greenwood, Mississippi, and Sunny's town is being invaded by people from up north who are coming to help people register to vote. Her personal life isn't much better, as a new stepmother, brother, and sister are crowding into her life, giving her little room to breathe.--From publisher description.