At the end of August 2005, ten-year-old Armani is looking forward to her birthday party in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where she and her extended family live, but Hurricane Katrina is on the way, bringing destruction and tragedy in its wake.

A man known as the "Trashcan Wizard" sings and dances his way through the French Quarter in New Orleans, keeping his beloved city clean, until Hurricane Katrina's devastation nearly causes him to lose his spirit.

In New Orleans' Ninth Ward, twelve-year-old Lanesha, who can see spirits, and her adopted grandmother have no choice but to stay and weather the storm as Hurricane Katrina bears down upon them.

Thirteen-year-old aspiring fashion designer Reesie Boone is eagerly anticipating her birthday when she can finally sew her first outfit on Ma Maw's sewing machine. But Hurricane Katrina hits her city of New Orleans while Reesie is home alone, and she is forced to escape in a boat along with her elderly neighbor, Miss Martine. Although Reesie is finally rejoined with her family, they still have a long journey to undertake before they can return home....

Jimmy, a yellow Labrador puppy, is separated from his Lake Charles, Louisiana, family and survives the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on his own before being rescued and taken to New York City, where he tries to fit in with a new family and the many neighborhood dogs, and accept his new name.

The story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather's...

"Delicious and addictive."—Salon.com
"Reads . . . as if David Lynch directed a Raymond Chandler novel."—CNN
"What would you get if that punkish dragon girl Lisbeth Salander met up with Jim Sallis's Lew Griffin walking the back streets of New Orleans? Or Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone transformed herself into a tattooed magnolia driving a 4x4? Clare DeWitt, that's what you'd get . . . DeWitt's mesmerizing...

Bayou Perdu, a tiny fishing town way, way down in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, is home to sixteen-year-old Evangeline Riley. She has her best friends, Kendra and Danielle; wise, beloved Mamere; and back-to-back titles in the under-sixteen fishing rodeo. But, dearest to her heart, she has the peace that comes only when she takes her skiff out to where there is nothing but sky and air and water and wings. It's a small life, but it is Evangeline's....

When the mysterious first aid kit takes golden retriever Ranger to New Orleans shortly before Hurricane Katrina hits, he finds himself helping Clare Porter and her grandmother, who are waiting for Clare's father at their home in the Lower Ninth Ward--and when the levees break and Clare is separated from Nana, Ranger must somehow get her to the relative safety of the Superdome, and reunite her with her family.

"In seventeenth-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones. Four centuries later, amid the havoc of Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Ham escaps New Orleans with his only valued possession: a pendant handed down from his foster mother, Miss Pearl. There's something about the pendant that has always gripped him, and the curiosity of it has...