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,...

The only survivors of a devastating boating accident off the coast of Maine, Julia, Noah, and Kim struggle with their brush with death, their feelings of guilt, and their changed perspectives on their lives.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor, a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission somehow beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope deep...

On a warm May night in San Francisco, the Ritz-Carlton ballroom shimmers with crystal and silver as a glittering, celebrity-studded crowd gathers for a charity dinner dance. The evening is perfect-until, just minutes before midnight, the room begins to sway. Glass shatters. And as the lights go out, people begin to scream ... In the earthquake's aftermath, the lives of four strangers will converge ... Sarah Sloane, the beautiful wife of a financial...

"The New York Times bestselling author of the "heart-stopping tale of survival and heroism" (People) The Book of Lost Names returns with an evocative coming-of-age World War II story about a young woman who uses her knowledge of the wilderness to help Jewish refugees escape the Nazis--until a secret from her past threatens everything"-- 1941. Stolen from her wealthy German parents and raised in the unforgiving wilderness of eastern Europe, Yona finds...

From polar explorers marooned in Antarctica, to Moon-bound astronauts aboard a stricken spaceship, Tales of real survival records the courage, endurance and ingenuity of survivors.