With the memorable characters and plot twists she brings to her best-selling fantasies, acclaimed author Eva Ibbotson has written a hair-raising novel, set in turn-of-the-last-century Brazil. Accompanied by Miss Minton, a fierce-looking, no-nonsense governess, Maia, a young orphan, sets off for the wilderness of the Amazon, expecting curtains of orchids, brightly colored macaws, and a loving family. But what she finds is an evil-tempered aunt and uncle and their spoiled daughters. It is only when she is swept up in a mystery involving a young Indian boy, a homesick child actor, and a missing inheritance that Maia lands in the middle of the Amazon adventure she's dreamed of. Readers of every generation will treasure Ibbotson's lush historical adventure that harkens back to the beloved classics of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Louisa May Alcott.

Sent by his father to observe and evaluate his uncle's South Carolina rice plantation, New York Jew Nathaniel Pereira is horrified by his first brush with the brutal realities of slavery, especially the irony of how a people who themselves lived in bondage for so long could now own slaves. His moral dilemma becomes even more complex after he becomes captivated by Liza, a beautiful slave who harbors a shattering secret.

An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author’s fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressionsThis singular memoir begins with a transgression—the invasion of a private home in Johannesburg. But it is far more than the story of a theft. Lost and Found in Johannesburg is a luminous exploration of place, one in which the author’s and the reader’s assumptions are constantly being tested. As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Mark Gevisser was obsessed with maps—and with Holmden’s Register , Johannesburg’s street guide, in particular. He played a game called Dispatcher with this eccentric guide, transporting himself across the city into places that would otherwise be forbidden to him. It was through Dispatcher that he discovered apartheid by realizing that he could not find an access route to the neighboring township of Alexandra and, later, by realizing that Soweto was not mapped at all. This was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with maps and photographs, and what they tell us about borders and boundaries—how we define ourselves by staying within them or by transgressing them. This memoir is an account of getting lost in one’s hometown, and then finding oneself as a gay Jewish South African who was raised under apartheid and who eventually married a man of a different race as the country moved toward freedom. Using maps, shards of memory, photographs, and stories, Gevisser constructs a stunning portrait of race and sexuality, heritage and otherness.