Set on and around a summer tourist island off the coast of Sicily, TERRAFERMA tells the story of two struggling, yet disparate families, whose members become fatefully intertwined. A well-intentioned, but illegal rescue of immigrant "boat people" forces the individuals of the indigenous family to choose between their economic survival and doing the morally right thing.

"Through this authoritative account of the historical record and important new findings, Abramitzky and Boustan will help shape our thinking and policies about the fraught topic of immigration with findings such as: ·Where you come from doesn't matter. The children of immigrants from El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala today are as likely to be as successful as the children of immigrants from Great Britain and Norway 150 years ago. ·Children of immigrants...

Dear Mother and Father, After all those years, I was certain Jakob Hirsch had forgotten me. Then came his proposal of marriage. With more impulse than wisdom, I crossed the ocean to begin a new life with him in Shadow Creek, Idaho. Little did I dream of the changes eleven years had brought to the man I once loved-which included three small children waiting with him at the station. I will not marry a stranger who no longer loves me, but I have agreed...

Nostalghia is Andrei Tarkovsky's brooding late masterpiece, a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word "nostalghia" conveys "the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away." This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky, The Mirror), a Russian...

"When Shu Lin starts at her new school, she wears yellow rain boots and a pink coat. At recess, she stands alone in the playground. At lunchtime, she eats by herself from little boxes of brightly colored food. Her classmates aren't sure what to make of her. But one day, when Shu Lin's grandpa comes to school to share his amazing artwork, everything changes"--

Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.

Celebrates United States immigration and the country's diverse immigrant heritage.

A Turkish chambermaid working at a London hotel full of illegal activity discovers a human heart in a toilet.

In Minnesota in 1911, Nilda Carlson is torn between society life in the city of Blackduck and spending time with her family back home on the farm. Her employer, Mrs. Schoenleber, gives her more and more responsibility and experience, including recommending new opportunities for her philanthropy. Still new to America herself, Nilda focuses on the area's immigrant community, but she'll have to fight to get her ideas accepted by the locals and donors...

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her family in the unexplored Wild West of the 1830s, at that point in time when Lewis and Clark are still a living memory, and when the clash between the powerful Indian tribes of the Missouri and the encroaching white Americans is about to turn into full-blown tragedy. Amidst all this, the Berrybender family -- English, eccentric, wealthy, and fiercely out of place...