Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run shows students how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you’ve never even met. Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative.

“[E]ngaging, surprising, provocative and moving. . . . A thoroughly intelligent book, an intimate

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He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the best of classical educations. Raised by a mysterious group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother–a princess in exile from a faraway land–are the only people in their household assigned names. As the boy’s regal mother, Cassiopeia, entertains the house scholars with her beauty and wit, young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his...

Socrates Fortlow, a tough, brooding ex-convict, explores philosophical questions of morality in a world beset with crime, poverty, and racism.