Life Fiction

Kylie Jean is usually good at everything she does. Now she's giving basketball a try. Dribble, pass, and shoot. That sounds simple enough. So how come learning to play basketball is so hard?

When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day he puts on a dress and refuses to take it off. He wants to bring a purse to kindergarten. He wants hair long enough to sit on. When he grows up, Claude says, he wants to be a girl.

Prepare to get horrid with Henry and friends! Join Henry as he discovers a lost dog, swaps his pesky parents, meets an amazing movie star, dons his detective hat and plenty more in this fun-filled volume! Contains 10 Horrid Henry stories, performed by the show's full cast. Dive in with Henry and friends on their adventures in "Lost Dog", "On Trial", "On TV", "Bookworm", "Perfect Plant", "Fearless Phantom", "Who Stole Mr. Kill", "All My Fault!", "King of Bling" and "Clever Clive".

Trey knows how the trick works: His dad gets him into a school full of kids with rich parents. Trey makes friends, and his dad makes connections. Soon, there’s the con, where Trey’s dad suckers the other parents into giving him money for one of his schemes. Once the money’s in the bank, Trey, his sister, and their dad go on the run … until they set up somewhere else and start again.

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and perhaps 400 billion galaxies in the universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of these extraterrestrials?

With one major enemy town behind them, the GreenPiece clan marches onward to new conquests. Facing Oren and his monster army are the combined forces of the so-called "civilized races", intent on halting his invasion of their territory. Reality blurs as Oren fights harder than ever to save the trapped players, his clan, and his family.

Max was murdered, but now he is mostly over it. Living on earth as a recent college graduate, he can still perfectly recall his past life on the fantasy world of Albion before that. He'd been hailed as the "Hero of the World" after crawling his way up from poverty, eventually enjoying great fame and luxury. But on mana-starved Earth, he's just a guy.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

One September morning, Doug accidentally runs right into another surfer on the beach. There are rules about these things. The other guy should call Doug a jerk, Doug should say, "my bad", and they should both paddle back out and move on. Problem is, the other surfer doesn't want to move on. He wants to fight. And for once in his life, Doug wants to fight back.

Kezia Cooper Hobson, recently widowed, arrives in New York from San Francisco. Determined to make a fresh start, she has just completed the sale of her Pacific Heights home, not to mention her husband's venture capital firm, and in doing so, is also freed from her responsibility as a board member of the company. Bringing with her only a few personal treasures, she is excited to move into the blank slate of a beautiful midtown penthouse, in the city that she has always loved. It is also where her two adult daughters now live.

Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it's served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don't knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing what's buried in the Morrows' backyard. But 19-year-old Michael Morrow isn't like the rest of his family. He doesn't take pleasure in the screams that echo through the trees.

With the empire now off their backs, Forge Eizo welcomes Anne as a permanent member of the family! Eizo offers to buy everyone gifts as rewards for their hard work, but they suggest something else—each member of the household gets to spend an entire day alone with him. Meanwhile, Camilo informs Eizo of a commission request from an unexpected customer: Marius! The count is finally getting married, and he wants a set of custom wedding rings. Just one problem—Marius wants them made from meghizium, a rare and expensive metal that only a handful of blacksmiths in the world can manipulate.

Stevie has been having repeated nightmares about the mysterious figure known as Herobrine. Some say Herobrine is an old ghost story. Some say he's a virus. But no one believes he is real...except maybe Stevie, whose nightmares are telling him that Herobrine is going to take over the Overworld.

Harriet Ann Jacob's autobiography documents her life as a slave and how she attained freedom for herself and her children. Harrowing in its descriptions of sexual abuse, Jacob's slave narrative is notable for the appeal it made to abolitionist women to open their eyes to the realities of slavery. Deemed too shocking for reading audiences at the time, the book was shelved before it was published in 1861 near the start of the Civil War.

Elisabeth Caldwell's first babysitting job is coming up none too soon. She needs to earn some cash to buy some new gear for her latest interest, tennis. When her grandma hears that Elisabeth will be babysitting, she offers up a list of advice. Meanwhile, Elisabeth is crushing on a boy, and her best pal has her own list of advice on how to get him. Unfortunately, Elisabeth soon finds out that not all advice is good, embarrassing herself terribly in the process!

Shy and gawky, Ana has always daydreamed about living the life of her exotic half-sister Bee, a pop singer who had a number one hit single before she inexplicably vanished from the celebrity scene. When Bee turns up dead, Ana is dispatched to the big city to clear out her apartment. Instantly seduced by the second-hand glamour of Bee's baubles, bangles, and bottles of Pierre-Jouet, Ana takes up with Bee's wild club-hopping cronies.

After losing her beloved husband Ray, Aunt Margaret is left vulnerable, isolated, and yearning for connection. When she turns to the internet for companionship, she unknowingly opens the door to a series of romance scams that prey on her trust and loneliness. Over the course of two painful years, Aunt Margaret sends hundreds of thousands of dollars to men she has never met—believing in love stories carefully crafted by strangers with cruel intentions.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Lark Smith has always had a plan for her life: find a fantastic guy, create a marriage as blissful as her parents’, pop out a couple of kids, and build a rewarding career as an oncologist. Things aren’t going so well. For one, the guy didn’t work out. Theoretically, she’d love to find someone else, but it hasn’t happened. Two, she’s just been transferred out of Oncology for being too emotional. (Is it her fault she’s a weeper?) Three, her parents just split up. Deviating from the plan was … well, not in the plan. A potential solution comes from the foul-tempered surgeon Lorenzo Santini.

Don't get me wrong, waking up to discover my ex-husband finally killed me wasn't fun. Finding out I had to get a job and pay Afterlife taxes about 10 minutes later? Let's just say, this wasn't exactly the eternal reward I was hoping for. But beggars can't be choosers, and being a demon sure as hell beats my last occupation. I’m well on my way to retirement behind the pearly gates when the impossible happens. The Risk Witches have a vision.