Cast out of the city of Agora where they were left at the end of The Midnight Charter, Mark and Lily must now survive in a dense forest. The strange villages, terrifying nightmares, and powerful witches they find there are even more frightening than Agora with all its slums and secrets. In an adventure that expands with every turn of the page, David Whitley delivers a novel as thrilling and horrifying as his characters' darkest dreams.

Twelve-year-old Josephine Russing lives alone with her father. Mr. Russing is a distant, cold man best known for his insistence that every member of their town wear gloves at all times, just as he does--even at home--and just as he forces his daughter to do as well. Then one day Josephine meets a boy named Fargus. But when she tries to follow him, he mysteriously disappears and Josephine finds herself in another world called Gulm. Gulm is ruled by the "Master," a terrifying villain who has taken all the children of Gulm. With Fargus by her side, and joined by Fargus's friend Ida, Josephine must try to find her way home. As the trio attempt to evade the Master, they encounter numerous adventures and discover the surprising truth about the land of Gulm, and Josephine's own life back home.

NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way. A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

This book is an extensive study of the figure of the lost child in English-speaking and European literature and culture. It argues that the lost child figure is of profound importance for our society, a symptom as well as a cause of deep trauma. This trauma, or void, is a fundamental disruption of the structures that define us: self, history, and even language. This puts the figure of the child in context with previous research that the modern conception of ‘a child’ was formed alongside modern conceptions of memory. The book analyses the representation of the lost child, through fairy tales, historical oppression and in recent novels and films. The book then studies the connection of the lost child figure with the uncanny and its centrality to language. The book considers the lost child figure as an archetype on a metaphysical and philosophical level as well as cultural.

Anyone who has done children's sermons will sooner or later hear from someone that "I learn more from the children's sermon than I do from the real sermon." And indeed, the truths of scripture are so simple that even a child can understand them. So it's no accident that children's sermons have become a central part of the worship service in many churches. Brett Blair and Tim Carpenter offer a year's worth of object lessons that engage children and impart profound lessons for all ages. Two sermons are provided for each Sunday in Cycle C of the Revised Common Lectionary, one based on the Second Lesson and one based on the Gospel. The messages are structured in two parts: the "lesson" uses an object to draw out active responses from children, then the "application" connects that object to the assigned scripture reading. Each message includes a clear statement of its exegetical aim. Bright, innovative, perceptive, creative, grace-filled Brett Blair and Tim Carpenter are all of those and much, much more, and that is reflected beautifully in their new book Children's Sermons A To Z. James W. Moore Pastor, St. Luke's United Methodist Church Houston, Texas Brett Blair is associate pastor of Asbury United Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee. He holds the M.Div. degree from Yale University Divinity School and is a cum laude graduate of Oral Roberts University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in New Testament Literature. Tim Carpenter is the pastor at First United Methodist Church in Bolivar, Tennessee. He is a graduate of Memphis Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and the University of Florida (B.A. in political science).