"Rich in imagery and the detail of small-town life and haunting in its portrayal of ordinary men and women struggling to understand loss. Under Mr. Banks's restrained craftsmanship, what begins as the story of senseless tragedy is transformed into an aspiring testament to hope and human resilience." — Atlanta Constitution In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame? Here is a stunning novel of "compelling moral suspense" (Los Angeles Times Book Review) from one of America's greatest storytellers.

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

Chappie is a punked-out teenager rejected by his mother and abusive stepfather. Out of school and in trouble with the police, he drifts through crash pads, doper squats, and malls until he finally settles in an abandoned school bus with Rose, a seven-year-old child, and I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian who will dramatically change his life. Together they begin an amazing journey...

After Heaven and The First Part Last, three-time Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Angela Johnson concludes her acclaimed trilogy with a poignant tale of finding where you belong and who you belong with. Shoogy left home with all her jeans still in the washer because she couldn’t think of a reason to stay. She’s not sure where she belongs, until she meets Curtis. Curtis knows for certain where he does not want to be and that’s to be back in the army. He is happy to be in Ohio, where it is quiet and he can spend time with Shoogy. But when Curtis gets orders to return to Iraq, will belonging with each other be enough to keep Shoogy and Curtis together? Angela Johnson takes us back to Heaven, Ohio in this bittersweet tale of first love found and lost.

The second installment in the Neely trilogy, which opens with a preposterously long sentence and goes downhill from there. Sex, gunplay, exhumed corpses. Something for everybody.

When fourteen children from the small town of Sam Dent are lost in a tragic accident, its citizens are confronted with one of life’s most difficult and disturbing questions: When the worst happens, whom do you blame, and how do you cope? Masterfully written, it is a large-hearted novel that brings to life a cast of unforgettable small-town characters and illuminates the mysteries and realities of love as well as grief. The Sweet Hereafter was released as a major motion picture by Atom Egoyan in 1997 and won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Egoyan also received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay that year.

The author of Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone and The Sweet Hereafter returns with a very original, riveting mystery about a young outcast, and a contemporary tale of guilt and redemption. The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion. Suspended in a modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the centre of Russell Banks's uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to go near where children might gather. He takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent. Enter the Professor, a university sociologist of enormous size and intellect who finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Banks has long been one of our most acute and insightful novelists. Lost Memory of Skin is a masterful work of fiction that unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical.