Books published by publisher Avon Books

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the most celebrated inspirational fable of our time, tells the story of a bird determined to be more than ordinary. This bestselling modern classic, reissued with a beautiful new cover design, is a story for people who want to follow their dreams and make their own rules and has inspired people for decades. 'Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight -- how to get from shore to food and back again,' writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. 'For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.' Flight is indeed the metaphor that makes this story soar. This bestselling modern classic is a fable about seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe or neighbourhood finds your ambition threatening (at one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock). By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan learns the meaning of love and kindness and gets the ultimate payoff -- transcendence. The dreamy illustrations by Russell Munson provide just the right illustrations for this spirituality classic that has inspired thousands of readers to follow their own path in life and so fulfill their true potential.

A best seller and critical success in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of teh mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. It is a rich and billiant chronicle of life and death and the tragicomedy of man. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family one sees all mankind, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo one sees all of Latin America.Love and lust, war and revolution, reiches and poverty, youth and senility--the variety of life, the endlessness fo death, the search for peace and truth--these, the universal themes, dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Garcia Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark fo a master. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettale men

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, free-wheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

Twelve-year-old Edward thought of Simon as his friend and never imagined life without his companion and slave. But when the Union army invades Virginia and takes over Edward's family's plantation, Edward's family flees to nearby Petersburg, while Simon runs toward freedom. With terrific detail and historical facts woven throughout, the author crafts a story set during the actual siege at Petersburg, complete with battle scenes, descriptions of army life on both sides of the war, and what life was like, told from the point of view of two young boys--one white and one black.