Late on Christmas Eve, after the town has gone to sleep, a boy boards a mysterious train that waits for him: the Polar Express bound for the North Pole. When he arrives there, Santa offers him any gift he desires. The boy modestly asks for one bell from the reindeer's harness. It turns out to be a very special gift, for only believers in Santa can hear it ring. "Magical glowing double spread pictures . . . an original and memorable book." - Guardian "Evocative, realist pastels and atmospheric text." - Sunday Times "A thrilling tale." - Independent

A lost baby polar bear shares the spotlight with a popular boy band in this Mermaid Tales adventure. Kiki Coral is thrilled beyond words when she meets a brand-new friend: a baby polar bear! The problem is, the little bear, whose name is Nestor, has floated away from home on a patch of ice and now he’s lost, hungry, and all alone! Kiki, Shelly, and Echo want to send Nestor back to his home on the Manta Ray Express, but a one-way ticket costs a whopping four jewels! That’s a fortune! Not to mention, all anyone at school can talk about is the Rays, who are performing a concert in Poseidon. Kiki loves the cute boy band as much as the next mergirl, but what about Nestor? Isn’t saving him more important than a concert? Can Kiki and her friends find a fun way to send their new furry friend home—and hang out with the Rays in the process?

The Polar Express train visits the North Pole and passengers find out what the first gift of the season is going to be from Santa Claus.

The reader can choose many adventures while visiting an Eskimo friend.

A precocious young girl is determined to prove herself as an explorer in the first novel in the whimsical Polar Bear Explorers’ Club series. Stella Starflake Pearl knows, without a doubt, that she was born to be an adventurer. It’s too bad girls are forbidden from becoming explorers. But Stella’s father has never been one to play by the rules. Leaving behind her pet polar bear, Gruff, and beloved unicorn, Magic, Stella and Felix set off on an expedition to the snowy Icelands. There, Stella plans to prove herself as a junior explorer, worthy of membership in the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club. So when Stella and three other junior explorers are separated from the rest of their expedition, she has the perfect opportunity. Can they explore the frozen wilderness and live to tell the tale? The first in Alex Bell’s imaginative new series, The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club is a fun and daring adventure filled with magic, outlaws, and fantastic faraway lands.

"I like to go out for walks, but it's a little awkward to push the baby stroller and carry a shotgun at the same time." -- housewife from Churchill, Manitoba Yes, welcome to Churchill, Manitoba. Year-round human population: 943. Yet despite the isolation and the searing cold here at the arctic's edge, visitors from around the globe flock to the town every fall, driven by a single purpose: to see polar bears in the wild. Churchill is "The Polar Bear Capital of the World," and for one unforgettable "bear season," Zac Unger, his wife, and his three children moved from Oakland, California, to make it their temporary home. But they soon discovered that it's really the polar bears who are at home in Churchill, roaming past the coffee shop on the main drag, peering into garbage cans, languorously scratching their backs against fence posts and front doorways. Where kids in other towns receive admonitions about talking to strangers, Churchill schoolchildren get "Let's All Be Bear Aware" booklets to bring home. (Lesson number 8: Never explore bad-smelling areas.) Zac Unger takes readers on a spirited and often wildly funny journey to a place as unique as it is remote, a place where natives, tourists, scientists, conservationists, and the most ferocious predators on the planet converge. In the process he becomes embroiled in the controversy surrounding "polar bear science" -- and finds out that some of what we've been led to believe about the bears' imminent extinction may not be quite the case. But mostly what he learns is about human behavior in extreme situations . . . and also why you should never even think of looking a polar bear in the eye.

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bears The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as “Yoko Tawada’s magnificent strangeness”—Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.”