Burlington Public Library

"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors. Baring the fallacy of the American dream-that wealth erases all problems-Steinbeck's classic illustrates our fall from innocence."--Pub.desc.

"Western Australia, 1886. After months at sea, a slow boat makes its passage from London to the shores of Bannin Bay. The sea is a shocking blue, and gulls float above battered mangrove jetties. From the deck, young Eliza Brightwell and her family eye their strange new home. Here is an unforgiving land where fortune sits patiently at the bottom of the ocean. A land where pearl shells bloom to the size of soup plates. Where men are coaxed into unthinkable...

In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of Nagashima, she becomes Miss Fuji. Although...

When Kai's twin sister, Kishi, is stolen and killed by the legendary Ghost Whale, Kai sets out a long and dangerous adventure to bring her back to life.

"Raised in a prosperous family of 14th century Chinese merchants, by the age of sixteen Wu Johanna's world reaches from Japan in the east to Tajikistan in the west. It's a world seen from camelback, through tent flaps, and in the cool, shaded caravanserai where travelers and traders gather along the Silk Road. Hers is a world of spice merchants and pearl divers, bandits and troubadours, servants and sheikhs. A world in which trust is more valuable...