Books with category Parallel Worlds
Displaying 20 books

Fairy Tale

2022

by Stephen King

Legendary storyteller Stephen King dives deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.

Because within the shed is a portal to another world—one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments; there are dungeons; there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.” And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.

Fairy Tale is a story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King's work, about an ordinary guy forced into the hero's role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.

In Some Other Life

2017

by Jessica Brody

Kennedy Rhodes turns down an acceptance to an elite private school, choosing instead to stay at her high school and seize the opportunity to date the boy of her dreams.

Three years later, Kennedy walks in on that same boyfriend cheating with her best friend—and wishes she had made a different choice. But when Kennedy hits her head and wakes up in the version of her life where she chose to attend the private school, she finds that maybe it’s not as perfect of a world as she once thought.

As a student at the prestigious Windsor Academy, she's at the top of her class, popular, and practically a shoo-in for Columbia University. But as she navigates her new world, she starts to wonder whether this alternate version of herself really is as happy as everyone seems to believe.

Is it possible this Kennedy is harboring secrets and regrets of her own?

A fresh and funny story about how one different choice could change everything, Jessica Brody's In Some Other Life will keep readers guessing, and find them cheering for Kennedy until the final page.

Two Summers

2016

by Aimee Friedman

One Summer in the French countryside, among sun-kissed fields of lavender...

Another Summer in upstate New York, along familiar roads that lead to surprises...

When Summer Everett makes a split-second decision, her summer divides into two parallel worlds. In one, she travels to France, where she’s dreamed of going: a land of chocolate croissants, handsome boys, and art museums. In the other, she remains home, in her ordinary suburb, where she expects her ordinary life to continue — but nothing is as it seems.

In both summers, she will fall in love and discover new sides of herself. What may break her, though, is a terrible family secret, one she can't hide from anywhere. In the end, it may just be the truth she needs the most.

From New York Times bestselling author Aimee Friedman comes an irresistible, inventive novel that takes readers around the world and back again, and asks us what matters more: the journey or the destination.

Akarnae

2015

by Lynette Noni

With just one step, sixteen-year-old Alexandra Jennings's world changes—literally.

Dreading her first day at a new school, Alex is stunned when she walks through a doorway and finds herself stranded in Medora, a fantasy world full of impossibilities. Desperate to return home, she learns that only a man named Professor Marselle can help her... but he's missing.

While waiting for him to reappear, Alex attends Akarnae Academy, Medora's boarding school for teenagers with extraordinary gifts. She soon starts to enjoy her bizarre new world and the friends who embrace her as one of their own, but strange things are happening at Akarnae, and Alex can't ignore her fear that something unexpected... something sinister... is looming.

An unwilling pawn in a deadly game, Alex's shoulders bear the crushing weight of an entire race's survival. Only she can save the Medorans, but what if doing so prevents her from ever returning home?

Will Alex risk her entire world—and maybe even her life—to save Medora?

Between the Lives

Sabine isn't like anyone else. For as long as she can remember, she's had two lives. Every twenty-four hours she "shifts," living each day twice.

In one life, Sabine has everything: popular friends, perfect grades, expensive clothes, and the guy everyone wants. In the other, Sabine's family struggles financially, and her friends are considered rebels.

But then she meets Ethan. He's gorgeous and challenging, and he makes her feel like she's never felt before.

All Sabine really wants is the chance to live only one life. But when this finally becomes possible, is she willing to risk everything - including losing the one person who might actually believe her - to make it happen?

The First Pillar

2013

by Roy Huff

Owen Sage is the emblematic college freshman at Easton Falls University. With all the worries about his first year in college, he was not prepared for what would happen next. His way of life was flipped upside down when he mysteriously crossed into another dimension, into the beautiful land of Everville.

His excitement was abruptly halted when he discovered that there was a darkness forged against both the natural world, which he knew well, and the new land which he discovered, Everville. He must devise a plan to save both worlds while joining forces with the race of Fron and The Keepers, whom both harbor hidden secrets he must learn in order to gain power over the evil that dwells in The Other In Between.

With a race against time to save both worlds, his short time at Easton Falls did not quite prepare him for the evil, dark forces he must fight in order to conquer The Other In Between.

Talisman Of El

2012

by Al Stone

WHAT IF YOUR WHOLE LIFE WAS A LIE?

One Planet.
Two Worlds.
Population: Human ... 7 billion.
Others ... unknown.

When 14-year-old Charlie Blake wakes up sweating and gasping for air in the middle of the night, he knows it is happening again. This time he witnesses a brutal murder. He's afraid to tell anyone. No one would believe him ... because it was a dream. Just like the one he had four years ago - the day before his dad died.

Charlie doesn't know why this is happening. He would give anything to have an ordinary life. The problem: he doesn't belong in the world he knows as home.
He belongs with the others.

An Angels Ascent

What would you do if you had everything you dreamed of but love? You were content until one day your world was forever changed...

Faellin Angel Hunter is not a normal young woman. She's a witch who hunts demons. She doesn't know it yet, but she'll cause the apocalypse—all in the name of a goddess she is reincarnated from and possessed by.

A metal rock band made up of vampires plays worldwide, trying to find the ONE. The lead singer, Aries, is a daywalking vampire with the voice of a siren... who calls for one woman who has a sleeping goddess inside her.

As Angel realizes who and what she is, her world crumbles around her. As she ascends into a higher being, the world will die away, leaving only an island of people. She must learn to control the powers that are embedded in her DNA, her genetic makeup.

Angel must become something not mortal, bring on the apocalypse, and save what is left of the human world. She must protect her tiny island as gates to alternate realities are broken and release other creatures. She'll come to see she cannot do this alone...

Angel and a misfit band of heroes will survive a pissed-off goddess of nature, only to fight otherworldly creatures, some good, some evil. Their adventures will span not only years but other worlds unlike their own.

Palimpsest

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now, she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside, and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger’s kiss.


Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night.


To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They’ve each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

Tender Morsels

2010

by Margo Lanagan

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother.

But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?

Man in the Dark

2009

by Paul Auster

Man in the Dark is Paul Auster’s brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us.

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter’s house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget—his wife’s recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter’s boyfriend, Titus.

The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America, the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued.

As the night progresses, Brill’s story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus’s death.

Passionate and shocking, Man in the Dark is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

InterWorld

InterWorld is an exhilarating journey across dimensions, crafted by the masterful storytelling duo, Newbery Medal winner Neil Gaiman and Emmy Award-winning science fiction writer Michael Reaves.

Meet Joey Harker, a seemingly average teenager who stumbles upon a mind-bending discovery: his world is just one among a trillion alternate earths. Some of these worlds are governed by the mystique of magic, while others are ruled by the cold logic of science. Yet, all are entangled in an epic conflict.

Joey's adventure begins when he inadvertently walks out of his world and into another dimension, making him a target for two formidable forces vying to exploit his unique ability to traverse dimensions. Faced with the enormity of this power struggle, Joey makes a courageous decision. He joins an army of alternate versions of himself, all possessing the same extraordinary gift, to fight against the nefarious magicians Lord Dogknife and Lady Indigo and maintain the delicate balance of power across these diverse worlds.

This gripping tale of magic, science, and heroism will captivate readers of all ages, especially those who have been enchanted by series like His Dark Materials and Harry Potter.

The Paradise War

From the dreaming spires of Oxford, Lewis Gillies drives north to seek a mythical creature in a misty glen in Scotland. Expecting little more than a weekend diversion, Lewis finds himself in a mystical place where two worlds meet, in the time-between-times - and in the heart of a battle between good and evil.

The ancient Celts admitted no separation between this world and the Otherworld: the two were delicately interwoven, each dependent on the other. The Paradise War crosses the thin places between this world and that, as Lewis Gillies comes face-to-face with an ancient mystery - and a cosmic catastrophe in the making.

Wolves of the Calla

2006

by Stephen King

Roland and his tet have just returned to the path of the Beam when they discover that they are being followed by a group of inexperienced trackers. The trackers are from the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis, and they desperately need the help of gunslingers. Once every generation, a band of masked riders known as the Wolves gallop out of the dark land of Thunderclap to steal one half of all the twins born in the Callas. When the children are returned, they are roont, or mentally and physically ruined. In less than a month, the Wolves will raid again. In exchange for Roland’s aid, Father Callahan—a priest originally from our world—offers to give Roland a powerful but evil seeing sphere, a sinister globe called Black Thirteen which he has hidden below the floorboards of his church.

Not only must Roland and his tet discover a way to defeat the invincible Wolves, but they must also return to New York so that they can save our world’s incarnation of the Dark Tower from the machinations of the evil Sombra Corporation.

The Prophecy of the Stones

2005

by Flavia Bujor

In a magical realm, three teenage girls—Jade, Opal, and Amber—are chosen to fulfill an ancient prophecy. On the day of their fourteenth birthdays, they set out on a quest that will require them to leave their homes and families and face fierce enemies in a land called Fairytale, where magic reigns and evil is unknown.

Although they meet as strangers, they must learn to trust one another with their lives as they embark on this epic journey, armed only with magical stones.

At the same time, in a parallel world, a young girl named Joa fights for her life in a hospital in Paris. While she is dreaming, she is transported to the magical realm where the three young heroines fight a spectacular battle. Their success or failure will determine the fate of Fairytale and Joa's survival.

City of Masks

2004

by Mary Hoffman

Lucien is seriously ill, but his life is transformed when an old Italian notebook gives him the power to become a stravagante, a time traveller with access to 16th century Italy. He wakes up in Bellezza (Venice) during carnival time and meets Arianna, a girl his own age who is disguised as a boy in the hope of being selected as one of the Duchessa's mandoliers.

Arianna gives Lucien her boy's clothing, and he is selected as a mandolier himself, becoming a friend of fellow-stravagante Rodolfo, the Duchessa's lover, and saving the Duchessa's life when she is threatened by an assassin hired by the powerful di Chimici family.

For state occasions, the Duchessa uses her maid Giuliana as a body-double, but Giuliana commits the fatal mistake of revealing the secret to her fiancé Enrico, leading to a sequence of devastating consequences.

Meanwhile, Lucien has met the original stravagante, the Elizabethan alchemist William Dethridge, and he begins to understand that he may be called to follow in his footsteps.

The Drawing of the Three

2003

by Stephen King

While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York. Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.

Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.

The Mirror of Her Dreams

With The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson changed the face of fantasy fiction forever. In The Mirror of Her Dreams, the astonishing first novel in the two-volume Mordant’s Need series, Donaldson shows us a world of wondrous beauty and seductive illusion, where mirrors hold the deadliest of magics and nothing is what it seems.

The daughter of rich but neglectful parents, Terisa Morgan lives alone in a New York City apartment, a young woman who has grown to doubt her own existence. Surrounded by the flat reassurance of mirrors, she leads an unfulfilled life—until the night a strange man named Geraden comes crashing through one of her mirrors, on a quest to find a champion to save his kingdom of Mordant from a pervasive evil that threatens the land.

Terisa is no champion. She wields neither magic nor power. And yet, much to her own surprise, when Geraden begs her to come back with him, she agrees. Now, in a culture where women are little more than the playthings of powerful men, in a castle honeycombed with secret passages and clever traps, in a kingdom threatened from without and within by enemies able to appear and vanish out of thin air, Terisa must become more than the pale reflection of a person. For the way back to Earth is closed to her. And the enemies of Mordant will stop at nothing to see her dead.

The Wandering Fire

2001

by Guy Gavriel Kay

In the second novel in Guy Gavriel Kay's critically acclaimed Fionavar Tapestry, five men and women from our world must play their parts in a colossal war, as the first of all worlds confronts an ancient evil.

After a thousand years of imprisonment, the Unraveller has broken free and frozen Fionavar in the ice of eternal winter. His terrible vengeance has begun to take its toll on mortals and demi-gods, mages and priestesses, dwarves and the Children of Light.

The five brought from Earth across the tapestry of worlds must act to wake the allies Fionavar desperately needs. But no one can know if these figures out of legend have power enough to shatter the icy grip of death upon the land—or if they even want to...

Nine Princes in Amber

1977

by Roger Zelazny

Amber, the one real world, wherein all others, including our own Earth, are but Shadows. Amber burns in Corwin's blood. Exiled on Shadow Earth for centuries, the prince is about to return to Amber to make a mad and desperate rush upon the throne. From Arden to the blood-slippery Stairway into the Sea, the air is electrified with the powers of Eric, Random, Bleys, Caine, and all the princes of Amber whom Corwin must overcome.

Yet, his savage path is blocked and guarded by eerie structures beyond imagining; impossible realities forged by demonic assassins and staggering horrors to challenge the might of Corwin's superhuman fury. Awakening in an Earth hospital unable to remember who he is or where he came from, Corwin is amazed to learn that he is one of the sons of Oberon, King of Amber, and is the rightful successor to the crown in a parallel world.

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