First published in 1930, "Not Without Laughter" is the debut novel by Langston Hughes and a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical tale of an African-American family in rural Kansas. Langston Hughes, born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, spent much of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas and it is here that he set his first novel. "Not Without Laughter" tells the story of young Sandy Rogers as he grows from a boy to a young man and focuses on his "awakening...

A bus full of children is taken hostage in this “screaming hit” (The New York Times Book Review) from the bestselling author of The Never Game and The Bone Collector.
Along a windswept Kansas road, eight vulnerable girls and their helpless teachers are forced off a school bus and held hostage in an abandoned slaughterhouse. The madman who has them at gunpoint has a simple plan: One hostage an hour...

Told in two voices, sixteen-year-old Galliard and seventeen-year-old Stella cross paths and realize they must determine their own futures as strange events occur in Slater, Kansas, and its neighboring commune in 1977.--

The award-winning author of "A Knight in Shining Armor" presents a historical family saga chronicling the lives and loves of three generations of women in a small Kansas community.

When Jack and Annie travel back to the Kansas prairie in search of "something to learn," they gain an understanding of how hard life was for pioneers and they experience the terror of a tornado.

Facing his share of ordinary challenges, from local bullies to his father's failed expectations, eleven-year-old Jack Clark must also deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl in 1937 Kansas, including the rising tensions in his small town and the spread of a shadowy illness.

During World War II, Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker, organized a rescue network of fellow social workers to save 2,500 Jewish children from certain death in the Warsaw ghetto. After the war her heroism was suppressed by communist Poland and remained virtually unknown for 60 years-- until three high school girls from an economically depressed rural school district in southeast Kansas stumbled upon a tantalizing reference to Sendler's...

"Still reeling from her older brother's death, Sadie is looking for answers. It isn't unusual for someone to die young in Cutler county--there have been so many overdoses in recent years that an article in the Kansas City Star bemoaned the decimation of the next generation of farmers. But Sadie's brother wasn't an addict. And though his wife who found him said it was a heart attack, he was only thirty-six years old and has never had any health problems....