From 14-year-old Joseph Dunn who was the lone survivor of the Shark Attacks of 1916, to 9-year-old Mike Kramer who, with the help of his quick-thinking parents, survived the Peshtigo fire of 1871 (which took place on the very same day in history as the Great Chicago Fire!), to the 13-year-old girl who survived a terrifying attack by a box jellyfish, this is a collection of unforgettable narrative non-fiction stories of unimaginable destruction --...

In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, fifteen-year-old Shorty, a poor gang member from the slums of Site Soleil, is trapped in the rubble of a ruined hospital, and as he grows weaker he has visions and memories of his life of violence, his lost twin sister, and of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who liberated Haiti from French rule in the 1804.

There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road. A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound deep in the backwaters of the bayou. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this cat, this feline, this creature he is supposed to hate. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the...

Friends Jenna, Locke, and Kara suffer a terrible accident that destroys their bodies, but their minds are preserved in a digital netherworld, allowing the friends to remain connected, until the day Jenna disappears, and then, decades later, Locke and Kara are given new bodies and discover everyone they knew and loved--except Jenna--are dead and gone.

Joe Simpson shares the story of his miraculous survival after he was injured while climbing in the Andes in 1985 and left for dead by his partner.

Having been raised believing he will die before he reaches the age of fourteen, Pepper Roux runs away on his fourteenth birthday in an attempt to elude his fate, assumes another identity, and continues to try to outrun death, no matter the consequences.

In the late nineteenth century, people were obsessed by one of the last unmapped areas of the globe: the North Pole. No one knew what existed beyond the fortress of ice rimming the northern oceans, although theories abounded. The foremost cartographer in the world, a German named August Petermann, believed that warm currents sustained a verdant island at the top of the world. National glory would fall to whoever could plant his flag upon its shores....

A Maori boy in 1803 and a plane crash survivor marooned on a deserted island in 2003 experience interconnecting visions.

As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier's eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined, until now. But the journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town's bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing and too earth-shattering in its implications, to be forgotten. Because if what Kate Holland saw in those days is real, then we must accept the impossible. We must accept that...

One moment, the World War II hospital ship Benevolence was cruising through the Pacific. In the next, she was engulfed in chaos, split in two by a torpedo. A small group of survivors makes it to the deserted shore of a nearby island, including a wounded Japanese soldier who saved a young nurse from death. Akira has spent five years engulfed in blood and horror. Now, surrounded by those he is supposed to hate, he instead finds solace in their company....