Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death, 16-year-old Jon Mosher turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive father. Jon and Ray form a tight friendship, but it’s not until Ray falls in love with Karen Dorsey that the three friends begin to dream of breaking away from Brewster for good. Freedom, however, has its price.

After their parents die, sisters Marnie and Nelly are on their own. Only they know what happened to their parents, and they aren't telling. When Lennie, the old man next door, realizes his young neighbors are alone and need help, he offers to take them in. But questions from their friends, teachers and the authorities soon threaten to bring dark secrets about the girls' family to the surface.

Max Walker is a golden boy. Attractive, intelligent, and athletic, he’s the perfect son, the perfect friend, and the perfect crush for the girls in his school. He’s even really nice to his little brother. Karen, Max’s mother, is a highly successful criminal lawyer, determined to maintain the façade of effortless excellence she has constructed through the years. Now that the boys are getting older, now that she won’t have as much control, she worries that the façade might soon begin to crumble. Adding to the tension, her husband, Steve, has chosen this moment to stand for election to Parliament. The spotlight of the media is about to encircle their lives.

Sylvie Mason’s parents have an unusual occupation --- helping “haunted souls” find peace. After receiving a strange phone call one winter’s night, they leave the house and are later murdered in an old church in a horrifying act of violence. A year later, the inquisitive teenager pursues the mystery, moving closer to the knowledge of what occurred that night --- and to the truth about her family’s past and the secrets that have haunted them for years.

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students are taught to persuade. They harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as “poets”: adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.

A rare meteorite struck Alex Woods when he was 10 years old, leaving scars and marking him for an extraordinary future. When he meets curmudgeonly widower Mr. Peterson, he finds an unlikely friend, who teaches him that you only get one shot at life and you need to make it count. So when, at age 17, Alex is stopped at customs with 113 grams of marijuana, an urn full of ashes on the front seat, and an entire nation in uproar, he's fairly sure he's done the right thing.

From Koren Zailckas, author of the iconic memoir SMASHED: an electrifying debut novel about a family being torn apart by the woman who claims to love them most.

Out-of-shape IT technician Roen now has a passenger in his brain --- an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Now split into two opposing factions --- the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix --- the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet, and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

Two and a half years after an unspeakable tragedy left her a shadow of the girl she once was, Nastya Kashnikov moves to a new town determined to keep her dark past hidden and hold everyone at a distance. But her plans only last so long before she finds herself inexplicably drawn to the one person as isolated as herself: Josh Bennett, who has lost everyone he knows. People stay away from Josh because his name is synonymous with death, but the pull between him and Nastya is undeniable.