Discusses the placement of over 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children in homes throughout the Midwest from 1854 to 1929 by recounting the story of one boy and his brothers.

Decades after World War II, Nathaniel Williams reflects on his experiences in 1945, when his parents left him and his sister in the care of a mysterious neighbor. Just after World War II, Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth and his eccentric crew of friends. These friends are men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified...

"Sarah Booth Delaney and her friends are still recovering from the attack on Scott Hampton's blues club in Zinnia, Mississippi, and Sarah Booth herself is still overcoming her grief at ending things with her fiancé. One bitterly cold night at her family's ancestral home in Zinnia, Sarah Booth hears what sounds like a kitten as she passes the front door. She opens the door to find a newborn baby in a basket on her front porch - with bloody footsteps...

"In her twelfth year, Kirabo, a young Ugandan girl, confronts a piercing question that has haunted her childhood: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small village of Nattetta-her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts, but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Complicating these feelings of abandonment, as Kirabo comes of age she feels the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing...

Left motherless by tragedy and abandoned by his father, high school senior Seth McArdle has been put under enormous pressure to support his little sisters. At school, he endures the daily bullying of the football team. When he fights back, he's singled out for punishment, assigned to an after-school work detail under the supervision of a reserved groundskeeper, Abel. Much to his surprise, Seth discovers that Abel may be the only one who truly understands...

Explores the successes and failures of a resettlement program for orphaned and abandoned children on East coast who were put on trains and placed in farming communities in the midwest. This little known program ran from 1854 to 1929. Contains archival materials and interviews with elderly survivors.

Russ Millings has just been released from prison after serving 21 years for a third strike conviction for possessing an ounce of marijuana. As he tries to adapt to a world he doesn't recognize, including trying to learn how to use the internet, he finds an abandoned baby in a dumpster behind the fast-food restaurant where he works as a dishwasher. Unsure of what to do, and caught between impulses of kindness and panic, Russ soon realizes this could...

In 1950s Quebec, French and English tolerate each other with precarious civility--much like Maggie Hughes' parents. Maggie's English-speaking father has ambitions for his daughter that don't include marriage to the poor French boy the next farm over. But Maggie's heart is captured by Gabriel Phénix. When she becomes pregnant at fifteen, her parents send the baby Elodie to an orphanage where she receives horrible treatment. Seventeen years later,...

"Victor Alderheim has a lot to answer for. Not only has he heartlessly tricked his young ex-wife, Jenny, out of her art gallery inheritance, but he has also abandoned his son, Kevin, to die in the middle of the Kenyan savanna. It doesn't occur to Victor that Kevin might be rescued and adopted by a Maasai medicine man, or that he might be expected to undergo the rituals expected of all new Maasai warriors - which have him running back to Stockholm...

"From "a talented writer whose lyrical, evocative writing invites comparisons to Rick Bass and Richard Ford" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) comes a deftly woven novel that examines the layered makeup of a family: the affections and resentments, obligations and sacrifices"-- "Set in a backwoods village in northern Canada, this is the story of a young woman who leaves her dysfunctional, male-dominated family to make a new life in London. With...