Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom.

Based on the actual kidnapping of Inuit Eskimos by European traders in the seventeenth century, this story describes the violence inflicted in the name of civilization, while also evoking the beauty of Eskimo life.

In the eleventh century the teenage princess Anna Comnena fights for her birthright, the throne to the Byzantine Empire, which she fears will be taken from her by her younger brother John because he is a boy.

Instead of spending her teen years at parties and balls, Annie, an idealistic, poetry-loving patriot, finds herself nursing soldiers, hiding valuables, and running the household as the Civil War rages around her family's Virginia home.

When you read this novel about April 19, 1775, you will see the British redcoats marching in a solid column through your town. Your hands will be sweating and you will shake a little as you grip your musket because never have you shot with the aim of killing a man. But you will shoot, and shoot again and again while your shoulder aches from your musket's kick and the tight, disciplined red column bleeds and wavers and breaks and you begin to shout at the top of your lungs because you are there, at the birth of freedom—you're a veteran of the Battle of Lexington, and you've helped whip the King's best soldiers...

In alternating passages, a young White House seamstress named Bella and the actor John Wilkes Booth describe the events that lead to the latter's assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

After the death of her father, King Henry VIII, in 1547, thirteen-year-old Elizabeth must endure the political intrigues and dangers of the reigns of her half-brother Edward and her half-sister Mary before finally becoming Queen of England eleven years later.

In 1849, a fourteen-year-old Amish girl defies convention by leaving her secure home in Pennsylvania to accompany her father across the continent by wagon train.

Twelve-year-old Colton, son of a black mother and a white father, takes a job with the Pony Express in 1860 after his father abandons the family on their California-bound wagon train, and risks his life to deliver an important letter that may affect the growing conflict between the North and South.

After an arduous journey, Will Dwinelle and his friend Ben finally reach California in 1849 intending to bring home the man who betrayed the honor of a girl back home in Philadelphia, but find themselves tempted by the riches of the Gold Rush.

You only need three things to become a brave and noble knight: a warhorse, a fair maiden and a just cause. Will has a horse. Ellie is a fair maiden. King Richard is calling for a Crusade: the Knights of England must go to the Holy Land to fight. Will and his brother Gavin will go. The journey is fraught with peril and struggle, but through it all, they have two constants--Ellie and a blood red horse named Hosanna.

In the early seventeenth century, young Venetian Filippo Veroneo travels from Venice to Afghanistan to rescue his imprisoned father, Geronimo, and stops in India to raise the ransom by selling his father's beautiful diamond to the ruler Shah Jehan, who later uses the stone as the model for the Taj Mahal.

In twelfth-century England, after his master, a maker of coins for the king, is brutally punished for alleged cheating, seventeen-year-old Edmund finds himself traveling to the Holy Land as squire to a knight crusader on his way to join the forces of Richard Lionheart.

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

During the Middle Ages, the thirteen-year-old daughter of an English country knight keeps a journal in which she records the events of her life, particularly her longing for adventures beyond the usual role of women and her efforts to avoid being married off.

In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

In the 1880s, young Fanny McCoy witnesses the growth of a terrible and violent feud between her Kentucky family and the West Virginia Hatfields, complicated by her older sister Roseanna's romance with a Hatfield.

Someone is setting fires in New York City ... In 1741, America is at war with Catholic Spain. Phoebe watches as her town erupts into mass hysteria when the whites in New York City accuse the black slaves of planning an uprising. With people implicating each other at every turn, Phoebe has to decide if she's willing to save her friend Cuffee from execution, or if her own conscience and quest for freedom will be singed by her indiscretions.

Two fifteen-year-old girls--one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.

In medieval times as various groups of Vikings fight for supremacy of the northern lands and waters, Hallgerd, Gauk, and Hego, three young people from the quiet coastal village of Spjothof, find their fates intertwined as a series of events take them into danger far from home.

In the wake of Dawson City's Great Fire of 1899, sixteen-year-old Jason and his girlfriend Jamie canoe the Yukon River across Alaska in an epic race from Canada's Klondike to the new gold fields at Cape Nome.

While her tyrannical family is out of favor in Italy, young Catherine de Medici is raised in convents, then in 1533, when she is fourteen, her uncle, Pope Clement VII, arranges for her marriage to prince Henri of France, who is destined to become king.

A young centurion ventures among the hostile tribes beyond the Roman Wall to recover the eagle standard of the Ninth, a legion which mysteriously disappeared under his father's command.

Thirteen-year-old Halina Rudowski narrowly escapes the Polish ghetto and flees to the forest, where she is taken in by an encampment of Jews trying to survive World War II.

In Virginia in 1860, on the verge of the Civil War, fourteen-year-old Evvy chafes at the restrictions that her society places on both women and slaves.

Following orders from the United States Army, several young Japanese American men train K-9 units to hunt Asians during World War II.

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she is forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, amidst the social and political turmoil of 1968, middle-schooler Alice learns when to fight battles and when to let go from her family's elderly gardener, Doc, and begins to connect with her widowed mother.

Follows the life of thirteen-year-old Nathaniel Dunn, from May 1774 to December 1775, as he serves his indentureship with a music teacher in Williamsburg, Virginia, and witnesses the growing rift between patriots and loyalists, culminating in the American Revolution.

This insightful historical novel set during the Civil War looks at a girl's struggle to keep her family together and to accept her stepfather's beliefs about slavery and the war.

When news of the discovery of gold in Canada's Yukon Territory in 1897 reaches fifteen-year-old Jason, he embarks on a 10,000-mile journey to strike it rich.

In England's New Forest on the second day of August, 1100, eighteen-year-old Simon Foldre, delighted to be allowed to participate in a royal hunt as squire to the Anglo-Norman nobleman Walter Tirel, finds his future irrevocably altered when, during the hunt, he witnesses the possible murder of King William II.

In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.

After the Civil War Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother, finds himself caught between two worlds as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own.

Instead of leaving with the last of the Roman legions, Aquila, a young officer, decides that his loyalties lie with Britain, and he eventually joins the forces of the Roman-British leader Ambrosius to fight against the Saxon hordes.

In 1944, Jack Raab, a 15-year-old Jewish boy, tells his family he will travel in the West but instead, enlists in the United States Air Corps and is subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans.

In the late 1100s, a knight's squire, exhausted from the Crusades, must use his sword to fight attacking infidels during the return voyage to England.

Mary Tudor, who would reign briefly as Queen of England during the mid sixteenth century, tells the story of her troubled childhood as daughter of King Henry VIII.

In medieval England, a nameless, homeless girl is taken in by a sharp-tempered midwife, and in spite of obstacles and hardship, eventually gains the three things she most wants: a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.

When her father hatches a plan to bring publicity to their small Tennessee town by arresting a local high school teacher for teaching about evolution, the resulting 1925 Scopes trial prompts fifteen-year-old Frances to rethink many of her beliefs about religion and truth, as well as her relationship with her father.

It is 1864, the Civil War is moving toward an end, and President Lincoln has proclaimed his 'great measure'--Southern slaves are slowly gaining their freedom. But for thirteen-year-old Eulinda, a house slave on a Georgia plantation, it is the most difficult time of her life.

Fifteen-year-old Beric feels increasingly bitter isolation when, because of his Roman birth, he is cast out by the Celtic tribe that raised him and, after reaching a Roman settlement, he is sold into slavery and sentenced to serve in a galley for the rest of his life.

In 1501 fifteen-year-old Catharine of Aragon arrives in England to marry Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII, but soon finds her expectations of a happy settled life radically changed when Arthur unexpectedly dies and her future becomes the subject of a bitter dispute between the kingdoms of England and Spain.

In the tense summer of 1588, the time of the Spanish Armada, eighteen-year-old Sherwin Morris, after nearly perishing in a shipwreck, finds himself aboard the privateer Vixen, captained by the notorious and enigmatic Brandon Fletcher who offers him adventure and riches if Sherwin would write and disseminate a flattering account of the captain's exploits.

Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

When Thomas Peaceful's older brother is forced to join the British Army, Thomas decides to sign up as well, although he is only fourteen years old, to prove himself to his country, his family, his childhood love, Molly, and himself.

When twelve-year-old Nicola leaves Troupe Brufort and serves as the fool for Mary, Queen of Scots, she experiences the political and religious upheavals in both France and Scotland.

On his first Viking raid, seventeen-year-old Lidsmod sails on the ship Raven, joining his comrades as they destroy and plunder villages in medieval England and take an Anglo-Saxon boy as captive.

As the Civil War breaks out, India, a young Southern girl, summons her sharp intelligence and the courage she didn't know she had to survive the war that threatens to destroy her family, her Virginia home, and the only life she has ever known.

In the late eighteenth-century, Sido, the twelve-year-old daughter of a self-indulgent marquis, and Yann, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy orphan raised to perform in a magic show, face a common enemy at the start of the French Revolution.

Left alone after the deaths of her father and brother who take opposite sides in the War for Independence, and fleeing from the British who seek to arrest her, Sarah Bishop struggles to shape a new life for herself in the wilderness.

Recent high school graduate Rick Ward, undecided about his future and eager to escape his unhappy home life, joins the army and experiences the horrors of the war in Vietnam.

In 1587, sailing to Spain on board Sir Francis Drake's ship "Elizabeth Bonaventure," seventeen-year-old surgeon's apprentice Thomas Spyre finds that, with the sudden death of his master, he must take over as ship's surgeon and prove his skill not only as a doctor but also as a fighter when he is enlisted by Drake to face battle.

Life in their Pennsylvania hometown changes for Jubal Shoemaker and his family when his older brother Bud witnesses to his Quaker beliefs by becoming a conscientious objector during World War II.

Eager to enlist, fifteen-year-old Charley has a change of heart after experiencing both the physical horrors and mental anguish of Civil War combat.

During World War II, sheltering an escaped German prisoner of war is the beginning of some shattering experiences for Patty Bergen, a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Arkansas.

Robin Perry, from Harlem, is sent to Iraq in 2003 as a member of the Civilian Affairs Battalion, and his time there profoundly changes him.

Tancred Redwan, a knight torn between his father's Norman blood and his mother's Moorish blood, must choose sides during the First Crusades.

In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.

In this sequel to Under a War-Torn Sky (Hyperion, 2001), 19-year-old Henry, home from World War II, is troubled with nightmares about his battles and losses. He still loves Patsy, who will not marry him until he goes back to post-war France to look for Pierre, a boy he promised to return for after Pierre helped him. This book is filled with historical situations and images of battle-scarred Europe, and brings to life the tragedy of war.

In nineteenth-century England, young Charles Darwin rejects the more traditional careers of physician and clergyman, choosing instead to embark on a dangerous five-year journey by ship to explore the natural world.

After his plane is shot down by Hitler's Luftwaffe, nineteen-year-old Henry Forester of Richmond, Virginia, strives to walk across occupied France, with the help of the French Resistance, in hopes of rejoining his unit.

In France during World War II, Jo places his life in danger when he helps protect a growing number of Jewish children who have sought refuge at a reclusive widow's farm.

Having been taken as a child and raised by Comanche Indians, thirty-four-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is forcibly returned to her white relatives, where she longs for her Indian life and her only friend is her twelve-year-old cousin Lucy.

Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing her--to escape from the velvet cage that is Monticello, or to stay, and thus remain a slave.