It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and...

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy's father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr. Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard,...

The U.S.A. imprisons more people, per capita, than any country in the world. Behind 2.4 million prisoners lies an infinite ripple effect of incarceration on the family and community. A Sentence Apart follows three stories of people coping with a family member in prison, attempting to bridge broken relationships, and diligently working to reverse the generational cycle of incarceration. Tenea is a high school senior whose father has been in and out...

"After "rotten bad year" on the mainland, eleven-year-old Jett returns to Newfoundland to spend the summer with his sprightly Grandma Jo (whose hair is dyed cotton candy blue to match her house), bringing along a shameful secret involving the betrayal of a friend. As summer unfolds, Grandma Jo nurtures in Jett his sense of caring for others while giving him space to breathe. Jett finds himself examining memories of his past like bits of sea glass-arranging...

"Moving and evocative, this YA memoir-in-verse follows author Jiordan Castle's coming-of-age as her family reckons with the aftershocks of her father's imprisonment"--

"The New York Times bestselling author of Writing My Wrongs invites men everywhere on a journey of honesty and healing through this book of moving letters to his sons-one whom he is raising and the other whose childhood took place during Senghor's nineteen-year incarceration. Shaka Senghor has lived the life of two fathers. With his first son, Jay, born shortly after Senghor was incarcerated for second-degree murder, he experienced the regret of his...

Based on true events, it follows a secular Jewish family whose lives are turned upside down in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. When Isaac is suddenly arrested and taken to a secret prison, his wife is left to make sense of what has happened and must somehow secure Isaac's release and her family's safety.