The first book in Scott Westerfeld's international bestselling series, Uglies!

Tally lives in a world where your sixteenth birthday brings aesthetic perfection: an operation which erases all your flaws, transforming you from an 'Ugly' into a 'Pretty'. She is on the eve of this important event, and cannot wait for her life to change. As well as guaranteeing supermodel looks, life as a Pretty seems to revolve around having a good time. But then she meets Shay, who is also fifteen - but with a very different outlook on life. Shay isn't sure she wants to be Pretty and plans to escape to a community in the forest - the Rusty Ruins - where Uglies go to escape ' turning'. Tally won't be persuaded to join her, as this would involve sacrificing everything she's ever wanted for a lot of uncertainty.

When she is taken in for questioning on her birthday, however, Tally gets sent to the Ruins anyway - against her will. The authorities offer Tally the worst choice she could ever imagine: find her friend Shay and turn her in, or never turn Pretty at all. What she discovers in the Ruins reveals that there is nothing 'pretty' about the transformations... And the choice Tally makes will change her world forever.

This book was written in Sanscrit and provides a fascinating insight into a culture far removed from our own. Revealed is an ancient philosophy on love and how to treat women, both out of and in the bedroom. The book is of course most well known as a manual on how to reach a higher level of pleasure in one's sexual experience. The text was written by Vatsyana, who was and is renowned as the chief authority on Hindu erotic literature - Kama Sutra is literally translated as "Aphorisms on Love." Note - this version of the book is without illustrations.

What happened to Fischer wasn't my fault. In 1944, the year it all started, a war between nations engulfed the world. That same year the students of New Canaan High School waged another kind of war. I, Tucker Landis, became its champion and its casualty. Back then my high school and my hometown held my entire universe. All my gods lived there. So did my demons....

Most of us had grown up in New Canaan or on neighboring farms and ranches. We had known each other all our lives, yet at school we segregated ourselves into exclusive cliques of our own making. Everyone held a defined rank and a prescribed place in the hierarchy. The rules were brutal. One misstep could ruin a reputation and doom the offender to the most dreaded of all punishments: ridicule. Ridicule had girls bawling in the restroom at school, and guys sobbing into their pillows at night...

Fischer recognized all of this, but unlike the rest of us, he understood something more: the hierarchy held no power over those who simply ignored it. With that profound insight, Fischer would wage his own private war.

The Between Season is his story