The Sun Also Rises is a quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. It provides a poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation.
The novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates.
Set against an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions, the narrative captures the essence of a generation trying to find meaning in a world turned upside down. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises helped to establish Hemingway as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
Ever wondered where lost things go?
When Sandy Shortt was ten years old, a girl from her class vanished, leaving her with an unquenchable curiosity about missing things. This event ignited a lifelong obsession with finding everything that gets lost: from socks and keys to, eventually, people. Sandy dedicates her life to her search agency, giving hope to those who have lost loved ones, as she never gives up.
But when she takes on the case of Jack Ruttle's missing brother, Sandy herself disappears into a mysterious place known only as "Here."
This novel, full of imagination, suspense, and heartfelt moments, embarks on a quest to discover life, love, and our own identities.
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Some boxes should never be opened. For the first time, the complete A Series of Unfortunate Events is available in one awful package!
We can't keep you from succumbing to this international bestselling phenomenon, but we can hide all thirteen books in a huge, elaborately illustrated, shrink-wrapped box, perfect for filling an empty shelf or deep hole.
From The Bad Beginning to The End, this box set, adorned with Brett Helquist art from front to back, is the only choice for people who simply cannot get enough of a bad thing!
The novel evolved and expanded from an 1849 short story or sketch entitled Oblomov's Dream. The novel focuses on the midlife crisis of the main character, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, an upper middle class son of a member of Russia's nineteenth century landed gentry. Oblomov's distinguishing characteristic is his slothful attitude towards life. While a common negative characteristic, Oblomov raises this trait to an art form, conducting his little daily business apathetically from his bed.
While clearly comedic, the novel also seriously examines many critical issues that faced Russian society in the nineteenth century. Some of these problems included the uselessness of landowners and gentry in a feudal society that did not encourage innovation or reform, the complex relations between members of different classes of society such as Oblomov's relationship with his servant Zakhar, and courtship and matrimony by the elite.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology by Charles C. Mann. This transformative book radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to the common belief that pre-Columbian Indians were sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness, Mann reveals that there were vast numbers of Indians who actively shaped and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan boasted running water and immaculately clean streets, surpassing any contemporary European city in size and sophistication.
Mexican cultures achieved remarkable feats, such as the creation of corn through a specialized breeding process, often referred to as man's first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land; they were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that are only now being understood.
This book challenges and surprises readers, offering a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.
The River of Doubt is an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. This true story takes you through the treacherous journey along the black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon, known as the River of Doubt. It's a place where Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows, piranhas glide through its waters, and boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt sought the most punishing physical challenge he could find: the first descent of this unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Accompanied by his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt achieved a feat so monumental that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, including losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, enduring starvation, Indian attacks, disease, drowning, and even a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide.
The River of Doubt brings these extraordinary events to life in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller featuring one of America’s most famous figures. From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rainforest to the darkest nights of Roosevelt’s life, Candice Millard’s dazzling debut is a must-read.
Nathaniel, 17, treats Bartimaeus worse than ever. The long-suffering djinni is weak from too much time in this world, near the end of his patience. Rebel Kitty, 18, hides, stealthily finishing her research on magic, demons, and Bartimaeus. She has a daring plan that she hopes will break the endless cycle of conflict between djinn and humans. But will anyone listen to what she has to say?
Together, the trio face treacherous magicians, a complex conspiracy, and a rebellious faction of demons. To survive, they must test the limits of this world and question the deepest parts of themselves. And most difficult of all—they will have to learn to trust one another.
Skin: A Natural History explores the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations.
Nina G. Jablonski examines the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She delves into our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification, revealing how skin serves as a canvas for self-expression.
This work provides a fascinating look at skin's structure and functions and tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution. It also touches on the importance of touch and how skin reflects and affects emotions, placing the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context.
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
Combining elements of the supernatural with gripping suspense and seduction, #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts presents the second novel in her Circle Trilogy...
He saw where the earth was scorched, where it was trampled. He saw his own hoofprints left in the sodden earth when he’d galloped through the battle in the form of a horse. And he saw the woman who’d ridden him, slashing destruction with a flaming sword…
Blair Murphy has always worked alone. Destined to be a demon hunter in a world that doesn’t believe in such things, she lives for the kill. But now, she finds herself the warrior in a circle of six, chosen by the goddess Morrigan to defeat the vampire Lilith and her minions.
Learning to trust the others has been hard, for Blair has never allowed herself such a luxury. But she finds herself drawn to Larkin, a man of many shapes. As a horse, he is proud and graceful; as a dragon, beautifully fierce; and as a man…well, Blair has never seen one quite so ruggedly handsome and playfully charming as this nobleman from the past.
In two months’ time, the circle of six will face Lilith and her army in Geall. To complete preparations and round up forces to fight, the circle travels through time to Larkin’s world, where Blair must choose between battling her overwhelming attraction to him—or risking everything for a love that can never be…
College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents is all the money Della has in the world to buy her beloved husband a Christmas present. She has nothing to sell except her only treasure -- her long, beautiful brown hair. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, this classic piece of American literature tells the story of a young couple and the sacrifices each must make to buy the other a gift. Beautiful, delicate watercolors by award-winning illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger add new poignancy and charm to this simple tale about the rewards of unselfish love.
Dina has unwillingly inherited her mother's gift: the ability to elicit shamed confessions simply by looking into someone's eyes. To Dina, however, these powers are not a gift but a curse. Surrounded by fear and hostility, she longs for simple friendship.
But when her mother is called to Dunark Castle to uncover the truth about a bloody triple murder, Dina must come to terms with her power—or let her mother fall prey to the vicious and revolting dragons of Dunark.
Thirteen Moons is a magnificent novel by one of America’s finest writers, set in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning of the raw power it takes to create a life and find a home.
In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins—for a brief moment—a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will’s destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians—including a Cherokee Chief named Bear—he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee’s homeland and culture.
This novel is brilliantly imagined and written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction. It is a stunning narrative about a man’s passion for a woman, and how loss, longing, and love can shape a man’s destiny over the many moons of a life.
Lauren has always known she was adopted, but when a little research turns up the possibility that she was snatched from an American family as a baby, suddenly Lauren's life seems like a sham. How can she find her biological parents? And are her adoptive parents really responsible for kidnapping her?
Running away from her family to seek out the truth, Lauren's journey takes her deeper and deeper into danger as she realizes that someone wants to stop her uncovering what really happened when she was a baby... at any cost.
A cursed book sends a young woman on a philosophical journey through an alternate dimension in this “stylish and dizzying” novel by the author of PopCo. Graduate student Ariel Manto has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists—especially Thomas Lumas, the mysterious author of The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel goes down an interdimensional rabbit hole of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. And to make matters worse, the CIA is onto her.
Following in Mr. Y’s footsteps, Ariel swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere: a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination?
HIDE OR FIGHT?
Matthias, an illegal third child, is caught in the crossfire between rebels and the Population Police. When he unwittingly saves a Population Police officer, Matthias is brought to Population Police headquarters to train as an officer himself. There he meets Nina, another third-born who enlists his help in a plot to undermine the Population Police. But Matthias is under constant scrutiny, and he has no idea whom he can trust. What can one boy do against a wicked bureaucracy?
Nick and Allie don't survive the car accident... but their souls don't exactly get where they're supposed to get either. Instead, they're caught halfway between life and death, in a sort of limbo known as Everlost: a shadow of the living world, filled with all the things and places that no longer exist. It's a magical, yet dangerous place where bands of lost children run wild and anyone who stands in the same place too long sinks to the center of the Earth.
When they find Mary, the self-proclaimed queen of lost kids, Nick feels like he's found a home, but Allie isn't satisfied spending eternity between worlds. Against all warnings, Allie begins learning the "Criminal Art" of haunting, and ventures into dangerous territory, where a monster called the McGill threatens all the souls of Everlost.
In this imaginative novel, Neal Shusterman explores questions of life, death, and what just might lie in between.
From the Earth to the Moon is Jules Verne's imaginative tale of a daring journey to the moon. Written in 1865, this classic adventure story is filled with satirical humor and scientific acumen. The story revolves around the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, who embark on an ambitious project to launch a rocket to the moon.
Their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes the construction of a massive cannon named the Columbiad, designed to propel a projectile to the moon. With a three-person crew aboard, including the daring French scientist Michel Ardan, the group faces numerous challenges and adventures along the way.
Verne's narrative is not only a thrilling adventure but also a visionary exploration of space travel. The similarities between Verne's fictional journey and the real-life Apollo 11 mission are uncanny, making this novel a timeless masterpiece that continues to inspire.
Join the adventure and discover how Verne's vision of space exploration was both ahead of its time and remarkably accurate in many ways. The story concludes in the sequel, Around the Moon, where the fate of the brave explorers is further explored.
The British crown has placed a price on Jacky's head, so she returns to the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston to lay low. But laying low isn't in the cards for a spunky lass who finds trouble even when she's not looking for it.
A school outing goes awry as Jacky and her classmates are abducted and forced into the hold of the Bloodhound, a ship bound for the slave markets on the Barbary Coast. All of Jacky's ingenuity, determination, and plain old good luck will be put to the test as she rallies her classmates to fight together to avoid being sold on the auction block in this new installment of the Bloody Jack Adventures.
When she was nine, Megan Meade met a group of terrible, mean, Popsicle-goo-covered boys, the sons of her father's friend — the McGowan boys. Now, seven years later, Megan's army doctor parents are shipping off to Korea and Megan is being sent to live with the little monsters, who are older now and quite different than she remembered them.
Living in a house with seven boys will give Megan, who has never even been kissed, the perfect opportunity to learn everything there is to know about boys. And she'll send all her notes to her best friend, Tracy, in...
Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys
Observation #1: Being an army brat sucks. Except that this is definitely a better alternative to moving to Korea.
Observation #2: Forget evil, laughing, little monsters. These guys have been touched by the Abercrombie gods. They are a blur of toned, suntanned perfection.
Observation #3: I need a lock on my door. STAT.
Observation #4: Three words: six-pack abs.
Observation #5: Do not even get me started on the state of the bathroom. I'm thinking of calling in a hazmat team. Seriously.
Observation #6: These boys know how to make enemies. Big time.
Megan Meade will have to juggle a new school, a new family, a new crush — on the boy next door, as in next bedroom door — and a new life. Will she survive the McGowan boys?
What's an Alpha Male to do when he meets the Alpha Female of his dreams?
Step one, hide all sharp objects.
All Zach Sheridan ever wanted was to become Alpha Male of his Pack and be left alone. What he definitely didn't need in his life was some needy female demanding his attention. What he never saw coming was the vicious, scarred female who not only demanded his attention but knew exactly how to get it.
Sara Morrighan knew this was the best she could expect from her life. Good friends. A nice place to live. And a safe job. But when Zach rode into her small Texas town with his motorcycle club, Sara knew she wanted more. She knew she wanted him.
But after one sexy encounter with her dream biker, everything is starting to change. Her body. Her strength. That new thing she's doing with the snarling. Even her best friends are starting to wonder what's going on with her.
But this is only the beginning. Sara's about to find out her life was meant for so much more. And Zach's about to find true love with the one woman who makes him absolutely insane.
Everyone has something to hide—especially high school juniors Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna. Spencer covets her sister's boyfriend. Aria is fantasizing about her English teacher. Emily is crushing on the new girl at school. Hanna uses some ugly tricks to stay beautiful. But they've all kept an even bigger secret since their friend Alison vanished.
How do I know? Because I know everything about the bad girls they were, the naughty girls they are, and all the dirty secrets they've kept. And guess what? I'm telling.
The last volume of the fabulously popular A Series of Unfortunate Events series, in which the history of the Baudelaire orphans is brought to its end.
You are presumably looking at the back of this book, or the end of the end. The end of the end is the best place to begin the end, because if you read the end from the beginning of the beginning of the end to the end of the end of the end, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope. This book is the last in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and even if you braved the previous twelve volumes, you probably can't stand such unpleasantries as a fearsome storm, a suspicious beverage, a herd of wild sheep, an enormous bird cage, and a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents.
It has been my solemn occupation to complete the history of the Baudelaire orphans, and at last I am finished. You likely have some other occupation, so if I were you I would drop this book at once, so the end does not finish you. With all due respect, Lemony Snicket.
From the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, this book is a work of astonishing intimacy and depth. Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl, who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, faith, and of herself in the world.
Her thoughts range widely: on Shakespeare and breasts, periods and piano playing, friendship and trees, consciousness and sleep, and much more besides. As she writes of William Blacklin, the boy she chooses as her first lover, or Julie, the teacher who encourages her spiritual life, Cordelia maddens, fascinates, and ultimately seduces the reader. This is a character never to be forgotten from a writer at the height of his powers.
A Feast for Crows is the fourth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin, the foundation of the acclaimed HBO series Game of Thrones. As a kingdom torn asunder finds itself on the brink of peace, it is quickly launched on an even more terrifying course of destruction.
With the death of the monstrous King Joffrey, Cersei rules as regent in King's Landing. The demise of Robb Stark has broken the back of the Northern rebels, and his siblings are scattered like seeds on barren soil. The war has burned itself out, but the aftermath is just as dangerous. Outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters gather, picking over the bones of the dead and fighting for the spoils.
In the Seven Kingdoms, new plots and alliances are formed, and surprising faces emerge from the twilight of past struggles to take up the challenges ahead. Nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages all stake their fortunes and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are guests, but only a few are survivors.
Little Earthquakes is a hilarious and warmhearted story from the New York Times bestselling author of In Her Shoes. It follows the journey of three young women as they navigate the complexities of new motherhood and find friendship amidst the chaos.
Meet Becky, a plump, sexy chef with an adorable baby girl and the mother-in-law from hell. Then there's Kelly, an event planner trying to juggle her career while managing motherhood and hoping her husband will get his act together. Lastly, there's Ayinde, married to a Philadelphia basketball star, facing the challenges of infidelity and a newborn.
As these three women grow closer, they are joined by Lia, a Hollywood starlet returning home to Philadelphia after a personal tragedy. Together, they discover the true meaning of friendship and support.
By turns moving, funny, and inspiring, Little Earthquakes is a delightful read from a prodigiously talented author.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch. That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities: Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.
The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction. There is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.
Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.
Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.
Este libro es el desenlace a la trilogía de Memorias de Idhún. Tras la última batalla contra Ashran y los sheks, muchas cosas parecen haber cambiado en Idhún. Sin embargo, los Oráculos hablan de nuevo, y sus voces no son, ni mucho menos, tranquilizadoras.
Algo está a punto de suceder, algo que puede cambiar para siempre el destino de dos mundos... algo que, tal vez, ni siquiera los héroes de la profecía sean capaces de afrontar...
San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear.
With picaresque characters and mesmerizing imagery, Saving Fish from Drowning gives us a voice as idiosyncratic, sharp, and affectionate as the mothers of The Joy Luck Club. Bibi is the observant eye of human nature–the witness of good intentions and bad outcomes, of desperate souls and those who wish to save them. In the end, Tan takes her readers to that place in their own heart where hope is found.
Shirley is set in the industrializing England of the Napoleonic wars and the Luddite revolts of 1811-12. It tells the story of two contrasting heroines.
Caroline Helstone is a shy young woman trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory. Her life symbolizes the plight of single women in the nineteenth century.
Shirley Keeldar, on the other hand, is vivacious and inherits a local estate. Her wealth liberates her from societal conventions.
This novel combines social commentary with the private preoccupations seen in Jane Eyre. It demonstrates the full range of Brontë's literary talent and is considered her most feminist novel.
Shirley is a revolutionary tale that imagines a new form of power for women—equal to that of men—through a confident young woman accustomed to thinking for herself.
Three years ago, David Hunter moved to rural Norfolk to escape his life in London, his gritty work in forensics, and a tragedy that nearly destroyed him. Working as a simple country doctor, seeing his lost wife and daughter only in his dreams, David struggles to remain uninvolved when the corpse of a woman is found in the woods, a macabre sign from her killer decorating her body.
In one horrifying instant, the quiet summer countryside that had been David’s refuge has turned malevolent—and suddenly there is no place to hide.
The village of Manham is tight-knit, far from the beaten path. As a newcomer, Dr. Hunter is immediately a suspect. Once an expert in analyzing human remains, he reluctantly joins the police investigation—and when another woman disappears, it soon becomes personal. Because this time she is someone David knows, someone who has managed to penetrate the icy barrier around his heart.
With a killer’s bizarre and twisted methods screaming out to him, with a brooding countryside beset with suspicion, David can feel the darkness gathering around him. For as the clock ticks down on a young woman’s life, David must follow a macabre trail of clues—all the way to its final, horrifying conclusion.
A searing, post-apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
Tiffany Aching is a trainee witch — now working for the seriously scary Miss Treason. But when Tiffany witnesses the Dark Dance — the crossover from summer to winter — she does what no one has ever done before and leaps into the dance. Into the oldest story there ever is. And draws the attention of the Wintersmith himself.
As Tiffany-shaped snowflakes hammer down on the land, can Tiffany deal with the consequences of her actions? Even with the help of Granny Weatherwax and the Nac Mac Feegle — the fightin’, thievin’ pictsies who are prepared to lay down their lives for their “big wee hag.”
Wintersmith is the third title in an exuberant series crackling with energy and humour. It follows The Wee Free Men and Hat Full of Sky.
Originally appearing as a series of articles in The New Yorker, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann sparked a flurry of debate upon its publication. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.
A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling and unsettled issues of the twentieth century that remains hotly debated to this day.
A dark force is rampaging through the forests of Mossflower. Gulo the Savage, a wolverine, flesh-eater, and brutal killer, has come across the seas in search of his brother, Askor. Askor stole the famous walking stone that will make one of them king of the lands of ice and snow - and Gulo wants it back. Anybeast who gets in Gulo's way is dead meat. Literally.
Rakkety Tam McBurl is a brave border warrior, travelled south in search of adventure. But when his army is attacked by Gulo's flesh-eating band, adventure finds him. Gulo is heading for the ancient Redwall Abbey - and Rakkety Tam is determined not to let the savage Gulo destroy the peaceful ways of Redwall.
Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.
Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties.
Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep's clothing. He's handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He's a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood spatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims.
But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened—of himself or some other fiend.
When Tiro, the confidential secretary (and slave) of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events that will eventually propel his master into one of the most suspenseful courtroom dramas in history. The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Marcus Cicero—an ambitious young lawyer and spellbinding orator, who at the age of twenty-seven is determined to attain imperium—supreme power in the state.
Of all the great figures of the Roman world, none was more fascinating or charismatic than Cicero. And Tiro—the inventor of shorthand and author of numerous books, including a celebrated biography of his master (which was lost in the Dark Ages)—was always by his side. Compellingly written in Tiro's voice, Imperium is the re-creation of his vanished masterpiece, recounting in vivid detail the story of Cicero's quest for glory, competing with some of the most powerful and intimidating figures of his—or any other—age: Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, and the many other powerful Romans who changed history.
Robert Harris, the world's master of innovative historical fiction, lures us into a violent, treacherous world of Roman politics at once exotically different from and yet startlingly similar to our own—a world of Senate intrigue and electoral corruption, special prosecutors and political adventurism—to describe how one clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable man fought to reach the top.
In nineteenth-century England, a powerful sorcerer and King of the Goblins chooses Kate, the elder of two orphan girls recently arrived at their ancestral home, Hallow Hill, to become his bride and queen...
The story unfolds in a magical realm where young women have been vanishing from Hallow Hill for thousands of years. Now, Kate and her sister Emily find themselves entangled in the land's dreadful heritage—until Marak, a powerful magician claiming to be the goblin king, reveals his very specific plans for the two new girls who have trespassed into his kingdom.
Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut in the mountains of Nepal. Her family is desperately poor, but her life is full of simple pleasures, like raising her black-and-white speckled goat, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family’s crops, Lakshmi’s stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.
He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy woman in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at “Happiness House” full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.
An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family’s debt – then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave.
Lakshmi’s life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother’s words – “Simply to endure is to triumph” – and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision – will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life?
Written in spare and evocative vignettes, this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs.
A bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess from an award-winning humorist. Whether David Rakoff is contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air; working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel; or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot—where he is provided with his very own personal manservant—rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly skewered.
Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Simultaneously a Wildean satire and a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable shows that far from being bobos in paradise, we’re in a special circle of gilded-age hell.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed. The novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.
Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone.
As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.
Evil exists. Evil walks the streets. And evil has spawned a diabolical new disciple in this white-knuckle thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen.
PECCAVI - The Latin word is scrawled in blood at the scene of a young woman's brutal murder: I HAVE SINNED. It's a chilling Christmas greeting for Boston medical examiner Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli, who swiftly link the victim to controversial celebrity psychiatrist Joyce O'Donnell—Jane's professional nemesis and member of a sinister cabal called the Mephisto Club.
On top of Beacon Hill, the club's acolytes devote themselves to the analysis of evil: Can it be explained by science? Does it have a physical presence? Do demons walk the earth? Drawing on a wealth of dark historical data and mysterious religious symbolism, the Mephisto scholars aim to prove a startling theory: that Satan himself exists among us.
With the grisly appearance of a corpse on their doorstep, it's clear that someone—or something—is indeed prowling the city. The members of the club begin to fear the very subject of their study. Could this maniacal killer be one of their own—or have they inadvertently summoned an evil entity from the darkness?
Delving deep into the most baffling and unusual case of their careers, Maura and Jane embark on a terrifying journey to the very heart of evil, where they encounter a malevolent foe more dangerous than any they have ever faced... one whose work is only just beginning.
All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist. The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish life histories for herself -- all of them inventions that have brought her fame and fortune but have kept her violent and tragic past a secret.
Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth, hidden by those who loved her most, remains an ever-present pain. Struck by a curious parallel between Miss Winter's story and her own, Margaret takes on the commission.
As Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness featuring the Angelfield family, including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Margaret succumbs to the power of Vida's storytelling but remains suspicious of the author's sincerity. She demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.
The Thirteenth Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life.
Outnumbered, outsmarted, and desperate, the hunters are on the run, pursued by the vampaneze, the police, and an angry mob. With their enemies clamoring for blood, the vampires prepare for a deadly battle. Is this the end for Darren and his allies?
In this gripping installment of the Cirque du Freak series, alliances will be tested and courage will be pushed to its limits. Join Darren as he faces his greatest challenges yet, where every decision could be his last.
After a high-speed chase, Light and the task force apprehend the newest Kira. Light regains his Death Note and his memories, and the depths of his cunning are revealed as the plans he carefully put in place before going into confinement are slowly unveiled. His masterful manipulation of both humans and Shinigami lead him to the strongest position he's yet enjoyed.
But the glow of his victory is marred when a new threat appears. Can Light withstand a surprise attack on two fronts?