"In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and...

Although Zana, an eleven-year-old Albanian girl, experiences the turmoil and violence of the 1999 conflict in her native Kosovo, she remembers her father's admonition to not let her heart become filled with hate.

"One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two sisters, eight and eleven, go missing. In the ensuing months the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. Social and ethnic tensions have long simmered...

In alternating voices, friends Asha and Yesofu, one Indian and one African, find their world turned upside-down when Idi Amin decides to expel Asian Indians from Uganda in 1972.--

The story of noncitizens in California, told through the eyes of two very different couples, one well-off Anglos, the other noncitizen Mexicans living in a canyon. The novel chronicles their relationship against the background of growing hostility between immigrants and natives. By the author of East Is East.

"Velveteen Vargas is eleven years old, a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist and shakily recovered alcoholic, and her academic husband, Paul. Gaitskill illuminates their shifting relationships over several years, as well as Velvet's encounter with the horses at the stable down the road. Mare is the story of a girl and a horse, joined with a story of people from different races...

Things aren't looking good for fourteen-year-old Mehrigul. She is a member of the Uyghur tribe, a group oppressed by the Chinese government. She yearns to be in school, but she's needed on the family farm. The longer she's out of school, the more likely it is that she'll be sent off to a Chinese factory ... perhaps never to return. Her only hope is an American who buys one of her decorative baskets for a staggering sum and says she will return in...