"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the...

At fourteen? Until recently, Matt, the hero of Nancy Farmer's award-winning The House of the Scorpion, was a clone grown from a strip of old El Patron's skin. Now he is lord of an army of eejits, zombielike workers who are harnessed to old El Patron's sinister system of drug growing. His country? The Land of Opium, on the one-time US-Mexico border. Opium is the largest territory of the Dope Confederacy, which ranges on the map like an intestine, from...

Jake Sully is a former Marine confined to a wheelchair. But despite his broken body, Jake is still a warrior at heart. He is recruited to travel light years to the human outpost on Pandora, where a corporate consortium is mining a rare mineral that is the key to solving Earth's energy crisis. He is given a mission to infiltrate the Na'vi, who have become a major obstacle to mining the precious ore. But a beautiful Na'vi female, Neytiri, saves Jake's...