Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore. Young Kimball O’Hara’s coming of age takes place in a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out between the Russians and the British in the mountain passages of Asia. Kim is torn

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If the saga of Top O' Hill Casino becoming Arlington Baptist College were written as fiction, readers would dismiss it as improbable and were written as fiction, readers would dismiss it as improbable and impossible. The story of a tearoom evolving into the gambling hot spot of North Central Texas that was then acquired by a fiery gospel preacher, who foretold its transformation into a Baptist seminary and ultimately an accredited Bible college, is...

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched...

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge's cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai's brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair....

Lame and suddenly orphaned, Kira is mysteriously removed from her squalid village to live in the palatial Council Edifice, where she is expected to use her gifts as a weaver to do the bidding of the all-powerful Guardians.

Born and raised in the appalling deprivation of a Victorian-era London workhouse, the orphan Oliver escapes the drudgery of apprenticeship only to fall into the hands of the notorious Fagin and his gang of child thieves. But Oliver is an innocent at heart and the attempts by Fagin and the impudently witty Artful Dodger to teach the boy the trick of the pick-pocket's trade lead only to his almost immediate capture. Oliver's rescue by the kindly Mr....

After he is befriended by a sign painter, a confused runaway finds trust and a purpose for living.

The foundling Tom Jones is found on the property of a benevolent, wealthy landowner. Tom grows up to be a vigorous, kind-hearted young man, whose love of his neighbor's well-born daughter brings class friction to the fore. The presence of prostitution and promiscuity in Tom Jones caused a sensation at the time it was published, as such themes were uncommon. It is divided into 18 shorter books, and is considered one of the first English-language

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"One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward...