At the end of World War II, Jack Baker, a landlocked Kansas boy, is suddenly uprooted after his mother's death and placed in a boys' boarding school in Maine. There, Jack encounters Early Auden, the strangest of boys, who reads the number pi as a story and collects clippings about the sightings of a great black bear in the nearby mountains.

The birthday child's animal friends bring ingredients and help make a birthday cake.

In a future where the law limits a family to only two children, third-born Luke has been in hiding for the entire twelve years of his life, until he enters boarding school under an assumed name and is forced to face his fears.

When her aunt and uncle take her from New Mexico to Lugano, Switzerland, to attend an international school, thirteen-year-old Dinnie discovers an expanding world and her place within it.

An eleven-year-old foster child tries to cope with her longings and fears as she schemes against everyone who tries to be friendly.

Now a teenager at boarding school, Mat explores the possibilites of town life in Malaysia.

When sixteen-year-old Thankful Curtis must leave Bright Island, Maine, for the first time in 1937, she has trouble adjusting to life on the mainland, new people, and "proper schooling, " and yearns for her days of farming with her father and sailing.

"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...