Ellen Marie Wiseman

Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloguing items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past....

"In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia's overcrowded slums and the anti-immigrant sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army. But as her city celebrates the end of war, an even more urgent threat arrives: the Spanish flu. Funeral crepe and quarantine signs appear on doors as victims drop dead in the streets and desperate survivors wear white masks to ward off illness....

"In this vibrant new historical novel, the acclaimed author of The Plum Tree and What She Left Behind explores one young woman's determination to put an end to child labor in a Pennsylvania mining town... As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River, Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now, orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn community. Treated like a servant...

Instant New York Times Bestseller!
For fans of The Girls with No Names, The Silent Patient, and Girl, Interrupted, the New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Collector blends fact, fiction, and the urban legend of Cropsey in 1970s New York, as mistaken identities lead to a young woman's imprisonment at Willowbrook State School, the real state-run institution that Geraldo Rivera would later expose

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A GREAT GROUP READS Selection of the Women's National Book Association and National Reading Group Month
A GOODREADS Best of the Month Selection

"A powerful, poignant novel."
—In Touch, Grade A

From the internationally bestselling author of The Orphan Collector comes a beautifully written and moving tale of family secrets and the importance of a...

This eye-opening novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Collector delivers "a spot-on portrayal of a dark time in American history" (Historical Novel Society, Editor's Choice).

Ellen Marie Wiseman draws readers into the Pennsylvania mining operations of the early 20th century—where children had no choice but to work in deadly conditions . . . or face starvation.
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