Late afternoon in a passport and visa office in California, nine people are in the office when an earthquake rips through the building trapping these nine together struggling to survive.

On the night of January 31, 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down on the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecting the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years. The author interweaves the stories of two sister, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn...

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously...

"Describes the people and events involved during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The reader's choices reveal the historical details"--

Hurricane Ophelia is bearing down on New York City, and in a matter of hours six people, along with their families and friends, will be caught up in the horrific flooding it unleashes. Ellen Wharton flew in from London to see her architect mother, but Grace Madison refuses to leave her apartment in the evacuation zone. British investment banker Charles Williams is looking for his daughters and ex-wife in SoHo. ER doctor Juliette Dubois fights to save...

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda.

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes-followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel...

"When a fragile young woman refuses to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approaches, her parents are forced to go without her, setting off a chain of events that leaves their marriage in shambles and their daughter catatonic, the victim or perpetrator of some unknown violent act"--

When a tsunami rages through their coastal town in India, 17-year-old Ahalya Ghai and her 15-year-old sister Sita are left orphaned and homeless. As they struggle to reach the safe haven of the convent where they attend school, they are abducted by human traffickers and thrust into a hidden world of sexual violence and illicit commerce, where the most valuable prize is the innocence of a child. Halfway across the world, in Washington, D.C., attorney...