Central Kansas Library System

Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. 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,...

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, on which survival is a daily struggle, eccentric Mr. Watts, the only white man left after the other teachers flee, spends his day reading to the local children from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations

Little Red Chicken wants Papa to read her a bedtime story, but interrupts him almost as soon as he begins each tale.

Irish orphans Molly, fourteen, and Kip, ten, travel to England to work as servants in a crumbling manor house where nothing is quite what it seems to be, and soon the siblings are confronted by a mysterious stranger and secrets of the cursed house.

When Stillwater the bear moves into the neighborhood, the stories he tells to three siblings teach them to look at the world in new ways. "Michael," said Karl. "There's a really big bear in the backyard." To Addie he tells a story about the value of material goods. To Michael he pushes the boundaries of good and bad. And to Karl he demonstrates what it means to hold on to frustration. With graceful art and simple stories that are filled with love...

A most unusual new student who loves to be the center of attention entertains her teacher and fellow second graders by telling absolutely true stories about herself, including how she got her name. Two-time Newbery Medalist Lois Lowry introduces a new girl in class who loves being the center of attention and tells the most entertaining "absolutely true" stories. There's never been anyone like Gooney Bird Greene at Watertower Elementary School. What...

Three friends relax after their picnic lunch by each telling his or her best story.

In 1910, Zada the camel treks across the West Texas desert to save two baby kestrels from an approaching haboob, a mountain-sized storm. She shares stories of the adventures from her youth in Turkey to keep them calm.

A father relates to his son the tale of his encounter--and friendship--with a gigantic trout whose enormous jaw is covered with so many lures and fish hooks that he jangles when he swims, but who has never been caught.