Meet Forrest Gump, the lovable, herculean, and surprisingly savvy hero of this remarkable comic odyssey. After accidentally becoming the star of University of Alabama's football team, Forrest goes on to become a Vietnam War hero, a world-class Ping-Pong player, a villainous wrestler, and a business tycoon -- as he wonders with childlike wisdom at the insanity all around him. In between misadventures, he manages to compare battle scars with Lyndon...

When Aaron Maciver's beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own.

First published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their Black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the...

"Thirteen-year-old Venus Black, a straitlaced, straight-A student is the last person anyone would expect to get in trouble, but when she is arrested for committing a shocking crime, it is clear that there was more going on in Venus's world than anyone knew. When she is released from a juvenile detention center five years later, she assumes a new identity in the hope of escaping the pain of her past, the mother that disappointed her, and her criminal...

"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...

"Over a weekend a teenage girl goes missing. Hal, a mentally challenged farmhand, returns from a hunting trip with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight. When the situation escalates from that of a missing girl to something more sinister, Alma Costagan and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of"--

Determined to become a doctor like her father when she grows up, Katy has a good sense for people and their sicknesses, so when she befriends Jacob, she sees that there is something in him that needs to be revealed.

"After nearly two hundred years of housing retardants, as they were once known, the Beechwood Institute is closing the doors on its dark history, and the complicated task of reassigning residents has begun. Ella Jules, having arrived at Beechwood at the tender age of eight, must now rely on the state to decide her future. Ella's aging parents have requested that she be returned to her childhood home, much to the distress of Ella's siblings, but more...

Having learned essential life skills from his grandmother that helped him overcome his low IQ, Perry finds himself without a caregiver at the age of thirty-one and wins a fortune by playing the lottery, a windfall that brings him more family than he ever wanted.

"Does your past define you forever? That's the question LAPD homicide detective Niels Madsen must answer after he gets in the middle of a standoff between two uniformed officers and Cisco, an intellectually disabled man. Cisco is found armed and standing over the body of a man with Down syndrome. Cisco swears the dead man was his good friend, and he didn't hurt him, but in his earlier life, Cisco had been a gang member, a brilliant and brutal killer....