A gift of a toy castle, complete with silver knight, introduces William to an adventure involving magic and a personal quest.

"When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave--only to discover...

"Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives--at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains--he discovers a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single mysterious nurse...

It's 1910 in Pownal, Vermont. At 12 Grace and her best friend Arthur must go to work in the mill, helping their mothers work the looms. Together Grace and Arthur write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in the mill. A few weeks later, Lewis Hine, a famous reformer, arrives undercover to gather evidence. Grace meets him and appears in some of his photographs, changing her life forever.

Alice wants everything in her bedroom to be blue before she falls asleep.

Twelve-year-old Suzy Swanson wades through her intense grief over the loss of her best friend by investigating the rare jellyfish she is convinced was responsible for her friend's death.

Best friends Lily and Salma disagree over their preferred foods, but after trading sandwiches to see how they taste, the girls change their minds.

"Aron, [a child living in World War II Poland], is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution ... When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of childrens' rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put...

"This abundance led to a volume of robust stories with the nerve to push against narrative expectations. The Best American Short Stories 2024 boasts a collection of twenty stories that "buzz with their own strange logic." A man becomes a tourist in his own hometown. An unemployed jeweler sails in an antique slave ship. A therapist decides to call an ex-patient years after their last session"-- Provided by publisher.

When drought and war threaten their land and her brother Isaias leaves their remote village on the edge of a sugarcane plantation to seek a better life in a southern city, fourteen-year-old Isabel follows him, only to find that he has vanished.