English Poverty

Always think in threes and you'll never fall, Cora's father told her when she was a little girl. Two feet, one hand. Two hands, one foot. That was all Cora needed to know to climb the trees of Brooklyn. But now Cora is a middle schooler, a big sister, and homeless. Her mother is trying to hold the family together after her father's death, and Cora must look after her sister, Adare, who's just different, their mother insists. Quick to smile, Adare hates wearing shoes, rarely speaks, and appears untroubled by the question Cora can't help but ask: How will she find a place to call home?

When Lyddie and her younger brother are hired out as servants to help pay off their family farm's debts, Lyddie is determined to find a way to reunite her family once again. Hearing about all the money a girl can make working in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, she makes her way there, only to find that her dreams of returning home may never come true.

When Michelle runs away from her drug-addicted mother, she has just enough money to make it to New York City, where she hopes to move in with a friend. But once she arrives at the bustling Port Authority, she is confronted with the terrifying truth: She is alone and out of options. Then she meets Devon, a good-looking, well-dressed guy who emerges from the crowd armed with a kind smile, a place for her to stay, and eyes that seem to understand exactly how she feels. But Devon is not who he seems to be.

Newbery Honor winner Joan Bauer's new novel will touch your heart.

Appalachia has played a complex and often contradictory role in the unfolding of American history. Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early 20th-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected.

It's the year 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend, Arthur, must leave school and go to work on the looms in the mill. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in their town, and a few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board.

Desperate, driven, harassed to the breaking point, Slake decides to go underground into the sheltering depths of the New York City subway, where he ends up staying for 121 days. This is the story about survival, and about a 13-year-old misfit's attempts to find footing in a hostile and threatening world.

Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why, beyond the idle curiosity, do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time.

When her best guy friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, 16-year-old Cat sets out to discover who in her small town did it. Richly atmospheric, this daring mystery mines the secrets of a tightly knit Southern community and examines the strength of will it takes to go against everyone you know in the name of justice.

Professional distance runners Elvin Kibet and Shadrack Kipchirchir grew up in rural Kenyan villages. Though their lives began in poverty, both were driven to reach their full potential, to gain an education, and make a difference. And they would find their way to do just that through the high-pressure world of distance running.

The stakes have never been higher. The games are do or die. Cory’s life has become one big gamble, and he’s on a path he never intended to take. Cory must decide whether he's willing to risk his life to save his friends and the one he loves, or save himself. In this deadly game of chance, Cory’s life once again becomes intertwined with the girl who betrayed him. But if he's not careful or misses the clues, he just might make a wager he will certainly lose.

What's new in LaVaughn's life is Jody, a boy she knew as a child who's come back to the housing project where she lives. Jody is like a miracle: he smells like chlorine; he calls her "little buddy;" he goes with her to the dance. It's just as if he's in love with her. Except not quite.

Travis’s Tacey’s mother has had an accident, a bad one, and the family is falling apart. His father, lost in a haze of grief, has focused his anger and guilt on his oldest son. Which is why, at age 14, Travis finds himself out of a home and on the road in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. With no more than a few dollars, a change of clothes, and his great-great-great grandfather’s guitar, Travis wonders how he is going to survive.

When home is a car, life is unpredictable. School, friends, and three meals a day aren't guaranteed. Not every town has a shelter where a family can sleep for a night or two, and places with parking lots don't welcome overnight stays. Opin, his brother Emjay, and their mother are trying to get to Los Angeles, where they hope an uncle and a new life are waiting. Emjay has taken to disappearing for days, slowing down the family's progress and adding to their worry.

Twelve-year-old Fud feels trapped. She lives a precarious life in a cramped trailer with her mom and her mom’s alcoholic ex-boxer boyfriend, Larry. Fud can see it’s only a matter of time until Larry explodes again, even if her mom keeps on making excuses for his behavior. If only Fud could find a way to be as free as the coyotes roaming the Wyoming countryside: strong, smart, independent, and always willing to protect their own.

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For 17-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world.

The unforgettable inspiring memoir of one extraordinary doctor who is saving lives in a most unconventional way, Ask Me Why I Hurt is the touching and revealing first-person account of the remarkable work of Dr. Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor's office on wheels. His patients are the city's homeless adolescents and children.

Paul Polak, whose organization International Development Enterprises (IDE) has directly helped over 17 million people get out of poverty permanently, exposes the top 3 things we are doing wrong in our efforts to end the root causes of poverty. He then, through the story of a Nepali farmer, goes on to detail solutions for what actually works when it comes to ending poverty.

It is rare in history that so many nations in the developed world are in crisis at the same time. There has been a disintegration of trust in political leaders and in the media that holds them to account. For all the progress humankind has made, for all the inventions and new technologies, our society is being undermined by inequality. We should care not simply because of its impact on productivity and growth, but because it's wrong. It's wrong that some don't have enough money to eat whilst others fly wagyu beef halfway across the planet for a couple of amusing mouthfuls.

From the opening conversation on a railroad trestle, Beggars of Life rattles along like the Fast Flyer Virginia that Tully boards midway through the story. This is the book that defined Tully’s hard-boiled style and set the pattern for the 12 books that followed over the next two decades. Startling in its originality and intensity, Beggars of Life is a breakneck journey made while clinging to the lowest rungs of the social ladder.