Jing-mei “June” Woo, whose mother Suyuan died before she could find the twin daughters she left behind in China during the war, travels to China with her father to meet her half-sisters.

Nick Allen, a fifth grader who invented the word “frindle” for a pen to challenge his strict language-arts teacher, Mrs.

Ralph, hunted across a burning island by Jack’s savage tribe of schoolboys after Piggy and Simon were killed, collapses on the beach at the feet of a British naval officer who has seen the smoke.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalf, searching for her mother Alice, an elephant researcher who vanished ten years ago after a death at an elephant sanctuary, discovers that she herself died that night, and that her helper, former detective Virgil Stanhope, is also a ghost.

On an island where things and their memories keep “disappearing,” enforced by the sinister Memory Police, the unnamed novelist narrator hides her editor R, who can still remember.

In a small Tokyo café where customers can travel back in time as long as they return before their coffee gets cold, the café owner’s wife, Kei, who is pregnant and has a heart condition, travels forward to meet her future daughter.

The Professor, a brilliant mathematician whose memory lasts only eighty minutes since a car accident, is eventually moved to a care home as his health declines.

Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old who has worked happily in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, quits under pressure from family and friends and from the lazy, bitter Shiraha, who moves in with her.

Mikage Sakurai, who lost her grandmother and found comfort with Yuichi Tanabe and his transgender mother Eriko, supports Yuichi after Eriko is murdered.

Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa survive the government’s “Program,” in which a class of forty-two students must kill each other on an island until one remains, thanks to the transfer student Shogo Kawada.