When Steve Best was 12, his mom disappeared--literally vanishing from her armchair in the sitting room. A terror-stricken scream for help, a blinding flash of light, and she was gone. Only a puddle of coffee and a stained notebook remained.

Now, on the second Christmas since her disappearance, Steve's life is a disaster. He's failing at school. His dad alternately mopes, yells, and apologizes. Even Steve's attempt to save a duck from the school bullies has led to the nickname he's dying to forget.

To make matters even worse, his dad is forced to travel over the holidays to...

A selection of twenty-nine insightful, creative essays, alive with superb and tender detail. Hymns of Home focuses on family and life in a way that references the questions we ask and are asked as parents, the way naming creates meaning, and the reflective nature of observation, the contained nature of technology. The man at the heart of these stories brings us closer to the world of childhood wonder, closer to our own knowledge, and asks us to ask of ourselves profound questions that, ultimately, bring us closer to everyman.

More than a dozen WWII-era German U-boats remain unaccounted for, the fate of their crews unknown. In summer 2012, sonar scanning found a submerged vessel of the right dimensions in Canadian province of Labrador. From this find grew Kill Shot, a fictionalization of the events that switches between the circumstances of the war that led the German crew to submerge and eventually die in the river, and the adventures that occur seventy years later when a teen boy finds the remains of the vessel and crew.

The boat's finder, Wednesday Smythe, is a pimply 14-year-old high school freshman...