A young girl thirsts for love and freedom, but at what cost? Ruby dreams of escaping the Congregation. Escape from slaver Darwin West and his cruel Overseers. Escape from the backbreaking work of gathering water. Escape from living as if it is still 1812, the year they were all enslaved. When Ruby meets Ford—an irresistible, kind, forbidden new Overseer—she longs to run away with him to the modern world where she could live a normal teenage life. Escape with Ford would be so simple. But if Ruby leaves, her community is condemned to certain death. She, alone, possesses the secret ingredient that makes the water so special—her blood—and it's the one thing that the Congregation cannot live without. Drought is the haunting story of one community's thirst for life, and the dangerous struggle of the only girl who can grant it.

A brilliant novel about memory, love, and the clash between the old world and the new, set in 1950s Spain “He turned his back on the old man to mourn in silence this unnecessary death and his part in it; but the sight of the coffin brought anger instead ...” In 1957, a burned-out British journalist leaves London to recuperate in the idyllic Andalusian village of Benalamar, a place little changed since the tumult of Spain’s civil war. But when a foreign businessman arrives with plans to develop the area, the community is thrown into turmoil. During a time of drought, the promise of a reservoir is meant to allay the fears of the local populace, but the developer has little idea what he is playing with. A local farmer commits suicide, and the investigation that follows leads back into recent history, lost love and civil war – all a far cry from the tranquil retreat that once promised respite from a world of lurid headlines and backroom shenanigans. Drought is a keenly felt novel about memory, love and the clash between the old world and the new.

The human face of poverty The poor in India are, too often, reduced to statistics. In the dry language of development reports and economic projections, the true misery of the 312 million who live below the poverty line, or the 26 million displaced by various projects, or the 13 million who suffer from tuberculosis gets overlooked. In this thoroughly researched study of the poorest of the poor, we get to see how they manage, what sustains them, and the efforts, often ludicrous, to do something for them. The people who figure in this book typify the lives and aspirations of a large section of Indian society, and their stories present us with the true face of development.

“The authors do not hold back.” —Booklist (starred review) “The palpable desperation that pervades the plot…feels true, giving it a chilling air of inevitability.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The Shustermans challenge readers.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “No one does doom like Neal Shusterman.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) When the California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, one teen is forced to make life and death decisions for her family in this harrowing story of survival from New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman. The drought—or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it—has been going on for a while now. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation; neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. And when her parents don’t return and her life—and the life of her brother—is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive.

"It's impossible to imagine another writer in America who is better than Craig Childs at elegizing the fearsome and confounding appeal of our most austere landscapes." —KEVIN FEDARKO, author of The Emerald Mile From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human. CRAIG CHILDS is the author of more than a dozen books on nature, adventure, and science, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Outside. Recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, he lives in Colorado.

Describes what causes droughts, the conditions that exist during a drought, the harmful and beneficial effects of dry periods, and their impact on humans, plants, and animals.