Charlie Nancy was leading a comfortable life until his father died and discovered that dear old dad was a human form of Anansi, the African trickster god, and that he had a brother, Spider, who inherited some of his father's godlike abilities.

William Smith, a middle-aged wine merchant, tries unsuccessfully through stronger and stronger hints to get his twenty-four-year-old son Eddie to move out, while other eccentric residents of Corduroy Mansions, a genteel, crumbling mansion block in London--including Freddie de la Hay, a vegetarian terrier--explore the limits of neighborliness.

Charlie Clark begins to think there is more to his father, Drummond, than meets the eye after their home explodes, bullets start flying, and his father, who suffers from Alzheimer's, hot-wires a car to help them escape, and as they run from two groups who are willing to kill Drummond in order to keep the secrets rattling around in his head quiet, Charlie learns of his father's years as a legendary spy.

A young boy, Paolo, and the man who murdered his parents, Angel, gradually become like father and son as they live and work together on the remote Chilean farm where Paolo was born.

Twelve-year-old Sam Hill and seventeen-year-old PJ discover a scary world of goblins under the earth after one of the creatures escapes through a tunnel in the ground, and when Sam follows it back down, PJ must go underground to rescue him.

Fourteen-year-old Zach learns he has the same special abilities as his father, who was the president's globe-trotting troubleshooter until "the Bads" killed him, and now Zach must decide whether to use his powers in the same way at the risk of his own life.

In modern-day England, where witches live alongside humans, Nathan, son of a White witch and the most powerful Black witch, must escape captivity before his seventeenth birthday and receive the gifts that will determine his future.

From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother's retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.