It's night and the dark is filled with strange sounds as Shane makes his way home. On a fence he finds a stray cat that at first growls and spits at him. But Shane talks and strokes the kitten to calmness, and decides to take the 'Spitfire, Kitten Number One,' home with him. No gang of boys, or avenue of dense traffic, or fierce dog can stop Shane carrying his new found friend to the place he calls home. Greg Rogers' sensitive use of charcoal and pastel create Shane and his cat in splendid city-at-night time scenes.

From two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo comes a story of discovering who you are — and deciding who you want to be. When Louisiana Elefante’s granny wakes her up in the middle of the night to tell her that the day of reckoning has arrived and they have to leave home immediately, Louisiana isn’t overly worried. After all, Granny has many middle-of-the-night ideas. But this time, things are different. This time, Granny intends for them never to return. Separated from her best friends, Raymie and Beverly, Louisiana struggles to oppose the winds of fate (and Granny) and find a way home. But as Louisiana’s life becomes entwined with the lives of the people of a small Georgia town — including a surly motel owner, a walrus-like minister, and a mysterious boy with a crow on his shoulder — she starts to worry that she is destined only for good-byes. (Which could be due to the curse on Louisiana's and Granny’s heads. But that is a story for another time.) Called “one of DiCamillo’s most singular and arresting creations” by The New York Times Book Review, the heartbreakingly irresistible Louisiana Elefante was introduced to readers in Raymie Nightingale — and now, with humor and tenderness, Kate DiCamillo returns to tell her story.

'So good I read it twice' - Hilary McKay, author of The Skylarks' War 'This thrilling time-slip adventure oozes magic and heart' - Bookseller EDITOR'S CHOICE When Charlie's longed-for brother is born with a serious heart condition, Charlie's world is turned upside down. Upset and afraid, Charlie flees the hospital and makes for the ancient forest on the edge of town. There Charlie finds a boy floating face-down in the stream, injured, but alive. But when Charlie sets off back to the hospital to fetch help, it seems the forest has changed. It's become a place as strange and wild as the boy dressed in deerskins. For Charlie has unwittingly fled into the Stone Age, with no way to help the boy or return to the present day. Or is there? What follows is a wild, big-hearted adventure as Charlie and the Stone Age boy set out together to find what they have lost – their courage, their hope, their family and their way home. Fans of Piers Torday and Stig of the Dump will love this wild, wise and heartfelt debut adventure.

Nearly sixty teens awaken halfway through their training, stranded on a harsh alien world with few supplies, no adults, and led by a treacherous artificial intelligence, but their greatest enemy is each other.

It was 11pm when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever. No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. THE WAY HOME is a modern-day Walden -- an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of THE MONEYLESS MAN, explores the hard won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging and fishing. What he finds is an elemental life, one governed by the rhythms of the sun and seasons, where life and death dance in a primal landscape of blood, wood, muck, water, and fire - much the same life we have lived for most of our time on earth. Revisiting it brings a deep insight into what it means to be human at a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.

'The best American political biography since Obama's Dreams from My Father' Guardian NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A mayor's inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal. Once described by the Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of," Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has now emerged as one of America's most visionary politicians. With soaring prose that celebrates a resurgent American Midwest, Shortest Way Home narrates the heroic transformation of a "dying city" (Newsweek) into nothing less than a shining model of urban reinvention. Elected at twenty-nine as the nation's youngest mayor, Pete Buttigieg immediately recognized that "great cities, and even great nations, are built through attention to the everyday." As Shortest Way Home recalls, the challenges were daunting: whether confronting gun violence, renaming a street in honour of Martin Luther King Jr., or attracting tech companies to a city that had appealed more to junk bond scavengers than serious investors. None of this is underscored more than Buttigieg's audacious campaign to reclaim 1,000 houses, many of them abandoned, in 1,000 days and then, even as a sitting mayor, deploying to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy officer. Yet the most personal challenge still awaited Buttigieg, who came out in a South Bend Tribune editorial, just before being re-elected with 78 percent of the vote, and then finding Chasten Glezman, a middle-school teacher, who would become his partner for life. While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Way Home, with its graceful, often humorous, language, challenges our perception of the typical American politician. In chronicling two once-unthinkable stories, that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a revitalized Rust Belt city no longer regarded as "flyover country" Buttigieg provides a new vision for America's shortest way home.

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