Ram Abdullah Antony

Vada Sultenfuss is obsessed with death. Her mother is dead, and her father runs a funeral parlor. She is also in love with her English teacher, and joins a poetry class over the summer just to impress him. Thomas J., her best friend, is "allergic to everything", and sticks with Vada despite her hangups. When Vada's father hires Shelly, and begins to fall for her, things take a turn to the worse...

While caring for her brother along with her audacious mother, a teenager strikes up an unlikely friendship with an eccentric activist who is protesting one of the most landmark medical cases of all time.

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, this is the tale of Lily Owens a 14 year-old girl who is haunted by the memory of her late mother. To escape her lonely life and troubled relationship with her father, Lily flees with Rosaleen, her caregiver and only friend, to a South Carolina town that holds the secret to her mother's past.