san francisco (calif.)

When two young strangers meet by chance on the day of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, they struggle to survive the terror of crumbling buildings, fire, looting, and chaos.

While working at pleasant but mundane summer jobs in San Francisco, fifteen-year-old twins, Sophie and Josh, suddenly find themselves caught up in the deadly, centuries-old struggle between rival alchemists, Nicholas Flamel and John Dee, over the possession of an ancient and powerful book holding the secret formulas for alchemy and everlasting life.

The author describes how he grew up as a Chinese American in San Francisco and how he came to use his writing to celebrate his family and his ethnic heritage.

Nineteenth-century American realist Frank Norris's brutal story of a San Francisco dentist and his greedy wife, two people doomed to lives of violence by their respective obsessions. Includes biographical notes, introduction, and afterward.

Taking a downtown office to plot his comeback in tumultuous 1970s San Francisco, a disgraced professor eavesdrops on a woman's therapy sessions and becomes enraptured by her struggles with identity and ongoing search for her war-torn Jewish-German birth family.

In the early twentieth century a young Chinese boy joins his father in San Francisco and helps him realize his dream of making a flying machine.