After her father kills himself, a young girl runs away with a traveling, unhoused stranger she meets at the bus stop. The two scrape and save for a life together until one day, she wakes up and he's gone. After looking for him in the cold, surviving an assault, and accepting help from a stranger, the girl realizes he's betrayed her, taking their savings and leaving. The next year, she gives birth to their child.

A woman grows obsessed with a single book from the time she is a young adult to her death in old age, as the book's meaning changes for her over time.

After a university student returns home from to Mali to find al-Qaeda has thrown his hometown into a state of chaos and destruction, he finds himself lost in the desert, with an unpredictable technology age genie emerging from his iPad to guide him to safety.

When a librarian finds a moving book of poetry among a donation, she is introduced to fellow lovers of the author's work who strive to preserve the poet's desire for privacy while commemorating her work.

A teenage boy searches a bookstore for the perfect gay romance novel, learning an important lesson about literary representation.

Though most of a prep school's students are away for the long weekend, a few boys stay behind at the dorms and are invited to dinner with a wealthy boy and his stepmother. At the dinner, the stepmother's attitude and appearance are just as alluring as the food, but the wealthy student acts strange and detached the whole evening.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

A Black foster teenager looks for escape from his life through books he borrows at a library. A witch-librarian guides his selections along the way, and ultimately gives him an off-limits book to help him literally escape the world.

A professor finds himself attracted to one of his students, allowing her to skip the final exams - but her resultant grade causes her to lash out at him and reveal harsh truths about his own life that he finds difficult to accept.

A boy visits the Ulysses County library seeking books that allow him to escape into distant worlds. As the witch-librarian chooses stories for him and senses him becoming more and more desperate, she eventually lends him a book that literally allows him to leave his world.