After a fire kills her parents, eleven-year-old Martine must leave England to live with her grandmother on a wildlife game reserve in South Africa, where she befriends a mythical white giraffe.

Left an orphan after the influenza epidemic in British East Africa in 1918, thirteen-year-old Rachel is tricked into assuming a deceased neighbor's identity to travel to England, where her only dream is to return to Africa and rebuild her parents' mission hospital.

Sandra Laing, a distinctly mixed-race South African woman, is born to white parents during the apartheid era. Despite her upbringing as a white girl, Sandra is eventually classified as 'Coloured' by the government and stripped of the rights with which the rest of her family is privileged. And when she begins a love affair with a local vegetable dealer, Sandra finds herself cut off from her past and living the hard life of a truly black woman in a...

The story of intelligence officer Max Vatan, who in 1942 North Africa encounters French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Reunited in London, their relationship is threatened by the extreme pressures of the war.

In 1854 eleven-year-old Bones is a slave in Virginia who sends a bottle holding her real name and a trinket from her long-lost father down the James River--the currents carry it far away, ultimately uniting the lives of three young girls.