Light from a Distant Star - Tapa dura

Caring for her shy younger brother while her mother returns to work in the wake of her father's failing business and her sister's search for her birth father, 13-year-old Nellie encounters three strangers including a junkyard worker, a New York City thief and a young stripper before witnessing a shocking act of violence. By the National Book Award-nominated author of Vanished.

MARY MCGARRY MORRIS was a National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist for her first novel Vanished, published in 1988. A Dangerous Woman, published in 1991, was chosen by Time magazine as one of the "Five Best Novels of the Year" and was made into a major motion picture. Her next novel Songs In Ordinary Time was a CBS television movie as well as an Oprah Book Club selection in 1997, propelling it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list as well as making it an international bestseller.
Since then she has written four highly acclaimed novels, the most recent of which was The Last Secret, published by Crown in 2009. She lives in Massachusetts.