In the 1960s, political tension forces the García family away from Santo Domingo and towards the Bronx. The sisters all hit their strides in America, adapting and thriving despite cultural differences, language barriers, and prejudice.

But Mami and Papi are more traditional, and they have far more difficulty adjusting to their new country. Making matters worse, the girls—frequently embarrassed by their parents—find ways to rebel against them.

The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America. Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, they arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind.

What they have lost—and what they find—is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premier novelists of our time.

They're back: Calvin, the six-year-old dirty tricksmeister and master of indignation and his warm, cuddly philosopher sidekick, Hobbes. A tiger whose idea of adventure is to lie on his back by the fire and have his stomach rubbed. In six short years, this unlikely duo has captured the hearts, the minds, and, most of all, the funny bones of America.

This treasury collection contains a never-before-published full-color section, as well as the cartoons appearing in The Revenge of the Baby-Sat and Scientific Progress Goes "Boink." All Sunday cartoons are presented full-page and full-color.

Miecz przeznaczenia is a collection of short stories that serves as a continuation of the adventures of Geralt from Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish), and at the same time precedes the story described in Saga o wiedźminie (The Witcher Saga). Generally, the stories included in this collection are no different from those written earlier. Geralt, with his strength, courage, and intelligence, fights monsters or in other ways tries to help people. The world in which the action takes place is depicted in a highly vivid manner, allowing readers to easily imagine it. The book is imbued with emotions, dreams, and values. On the pages of the stories, we see love, sacrifice, honor, determination driven by the intention to help a loved one, and attachment to one's own land.

Fatherland is set in a universe where Nazi Germany won World War II. In this alternate history, the story's lead protagonist, an SS officer, embarks on an investigation into the murder of a Nazi government official who was one of the participants at the Wannsee Conference. Through his investigation, he uncovers a plot to eliminate all attendees of the conference in order to help Germany gain better political accommodations with the United States.

Young Lerris is dissatisfied with his life and trade, and yearns to find a place in the world better suited to his skills and temperament. But in Recluce, a change in circumstances means taking one of two options: permanent exile from Recluce or the dangergeld, a complex, rule-laden wanderjahr in the lands beyond Recluce, with the aim of learning how the world works and what his place in it might be. Many do not survive.

Lerris chooses dangergeld. When Lerris is sent into intensive training for his quest, it soon becomes clear that he has a natural talent for magic. And he will need magic in the lands beyond, where the power of the Chaos Wizards reigns unchecked. Though it goes against all of his instincts, Lerris must learn to use his powers in an orderly way before his wanderjahr, or fall prey to Chaos.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside favela. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage.

It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, is an American classic—and Pulitzer Prize–winning story that epitomizes the love between a child and a pet. Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend.

This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals, and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humor enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity.

A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.

The world's threats are universal like the sun, but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow. Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practicing medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. He longs for the unattainably aristocratic Marcenda, but it is Lydia, the hotel chamber maid, who makes and shares his bed.

His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier. It is 1936, and the clouds of Fascism are gathering ominously above them, so they talk; a wonderful, rambling discourse on art, truth, poetry, philosophy, destiny, and love.

Too Loud a Solitude is a tender and funny story of Haňťa - a man who has lived in a Czech police state - for 35 years, working as compactor of wastepaper and books. In the process of compacting, he has acquired an education so unwitting he can't quite tell which of his thoughts are his own and which come from his books. He has rescued many from the jaws of the hydraulic press and now his house is filled to the rooftops. Destroyer of the written word, he is also its perpetrator.

But when a new automatic press makes his job redundant, there's only one thing he can do - go down with his ship. This is an eccentric romp celebrating the indestructibility - against censorship, political oppression, etc - of the written word.

Parable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility.

The author shares brief anecdotes about life in South America, memories of incidents from his own past, and meditations on reading, literature, and freedom.

First published in 1955, A Night to Remember remains a completely riveting account of the Titanic's fatal collision and the behavior of the passengers and crew, both noble and ignominious.

Some sacrificed their lives, while others fought like animals for their own survival. Wives beseeched husbands to join them in lifeboats; gentlemen went taut-lipped to their deaths in full evening dress; and hundreds of steerage passengers, trapped below decks, sought help in vain.

A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.

Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soul-mate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, a middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse.

This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life. In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice weaves this brilliant fiction, capturing the ineffable mood and complex humanity of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.

After months of menacing phone calls and the feeling that her every move is being watched, successful writer Beryl Madison flees Key West when a terrifying message is scratched on her car. But on the very night she returns to Richmond, she deactivates her burglar alarm and opens her door to someone who nearly decapitates her.

Why did she let him in? This is the question that haunts Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. And, why is Beryl's latest manuscript missing? Pursuing the answers involves Scarpetta in the murder of another writer - Beryl's jealous mentor.

While she copes with a variety of personal and professional problems, Scarpetta's high-tech forensic skills enable her to collect a body of evidence. Clues that would mean little without her intelligence, compassion, and imagination lead her directly into a nightmare all her own.

A freak accident renders an ordinary stock analyst invisible. Though invisibility has its pitfalls, he is able to eavesdrop his way into amassing a fortune in this side-splitting, tear-jerking mixture of fantasy and nightmare.

Sophie's Choice is a poignant and deeply moving novel that intertwines the narratives of three distinct individuals. At the heart of the story is the aspiration of a young man from the South, who holds an unwavering dream of becoming a writer. This ambition is set against the backdrop of a tumultuous love affair, marked by both passion and strife, between a brilliant Jewish man and a captivating Polish woman.

The novel delves into the harrowing past of the woman, Sophie, revealing a traumatic wound that haunts her—the very wound that propels both her and Nathan, her lover, on a path towards destruction. Sophie's Choice explores themes of love, guilt, and the lasting impact of the past on the present, making it a timeless exploration of the human condition.

Call It Sleep is a magnificent novel by Henry Roth, first published in 1934. It tells the poignant story of David Schearl, a "dangerously imaginative" child navigating the complexities of life in the slums of New York.

Initially greeted with critical acclaim, the novel struggled to find its audience in the dark days of the Depression. However, upon its paperback release in 1964, Call It Sleep finally received the recognition it deserved, becoming the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

With its richly drawn characters and vivid portrayal of immigrant life, this novel has sold millions of copies worldwide, captivating readers with its timeless exploration of identity, belonging, and the human spirit.

Here are the gods, goddesses, and legendary figures of ancient Greece--mighty Zeus, with his fistful of thunderbolts; gray-eyed Athena, goddess of wisdom; Helios, the sun; greedy King Midas--lavishly depicted by Caldecott winners Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire. In a relaxed and humorous tone, these splendid artists bring to life the myths that have inspired great European literature and art through the ages, creating a book readers of all ages will cherish.

"For any child fortunate enough to have this generous book...the kings and heroes of ancient legend will remain forever matter-of-fact; the pictures interpret the text literally and are full of detail and witty observation." --The Horn  Book

"The drawings, particularly the full-page ones in this oversized volume, are excellent  and excitingly evocative." --The New  York Times

"Parents, uncles, and aunts who have been searching for a big picture book that has good reading-aloud value for the younger ones and fine read-it-yourself value on up, have it in this volume...a children's classic." --Christian Science Monitor

In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations that usually pressure and antagonize us.

For him, a ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to our true selves. Dirty dishes, red lights, and traffic jams are spiritual friends on the path to "mindfulness"—the process of keeping our consciousness alive to our present experience and reality. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next aware breath and the smile we can form right now.

Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes, and stories from Nhat Hanh's experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the reader already is—in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking a path—and shows how deep meditative presence is available now.

Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and peace. He also shows how to be aware of relationships with others and of the world around us, its beauty, and also its pollution and injustices. The deceptively simple practices of Peace Is Every Step encourage the reader to work for peace in the world as they continue to work on sustaining inner peace by turning the "mindless" into the mindFUL.

It's the summer of 1960 in Elm Haven, Illinois, and five 12-year-old boys are forming the bonds that a lifetime of changes will never erase. But then a dark cloud threatens the bright promise of summer vacation: on the last day of school, their classmate Tubby Cooke vanishes.

Soon, the group discovers stories of other children who once disappeared from Elm Haven. And there are other strange things happening in town: unexplained holes in the ground, a stranger dressed as a World War I soldier, and a rendering-plant truck that seems to be following the five boys.

The friends realize that there is a terrible evil lurking in Elm Haven...and they must be the ones to stop it.

The Shepherd of the Hills is a captivating tale set in the enchanting Ozark hills. Originally published in 1907, this novel by Harold Bell Wright explores themes of strength, weakness, success, and failure.

The story unfolds around a mysterious, learned man who retreats from the bustling city life to find solace in the serene backwoods of Mutton Hollow. Here, he encounters intriguing characters like Jim Lane, Grant Matthews, and Sammy, each adding depth and richness to his journey.

Wright's masterful storytelling captures the essence of human struggles and triumphs, painting a vivid picture of life that is both enchanting and challenging. This is not a mere pastoral fantasy; it is a powerful commentary on the human condition, set against the backdrop of the beautiful yet demanding Ozark landscape.

The Shepherd of the Hills continues to inspire readers with its timeless truths and universal appeal. It's a story that resonates across generations, offering insights into grace, dignity, and the enduring spirit of humanity.

'There is no harm in a man's cub.' Best known for the 'Mowgli' stories, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book expertly interweaves myth, morals, adventure, and powerful storytelling. Set in Central India, Mowgli is raised by a pack of wolves. Along the way, he encounters memorable characters such as the foreboding tiger Shere Kahn, Bagheera the panther, and Baloo the bear.

Including other stories such as that of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a heroic mongoose, and Toomai, a young elephant handler, Kipling's fables remain as popular today as they ever were.

The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller by American writer John Grisham. It was his second book and the first which gained wide popularity. In this riveting novel, Mitch McDeere, a Harvard Law graduate, becomes suspicious of his Memphis tax firm when mysterious deaths, obsessive office security, and the Chicago mob figure into its operations.

Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel that explores the intricacies of friendship and the depths of human dreams. Set against the backdrop of World War II, it tells the story of two friends with contrasting personalities.

Al is a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to lift weights and pick up girls. In contrast, his strange friend Birdy is a skinny, tongue-tied, perhaps genius who dreams of raising canaries and flying. Their friendship is tested in the brutal reality of war, where dreams become all too real, and their lives are changed forever.

In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane. It's a story about love and war, madness and beauty, and above all, the essence of "birdness."

Darkness Visible tells the story of William Styron's recovery, laying bare the harrowing realities of clinical depression and chronicling his triumph over the disease that had claimed so many great writers before him. In the summer of 1985, Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that nearly drove him to suicide, leading him to seek hospitalization before the dark tide engulfed him.

His final words are a call for hope to all who suffer from mental illness that it is possible to emerge from even the deepest abyss of despair and “once again behold the stars.”

Calvin and Hobbes are back! The energetic six-year-old and his sidekick tiger endure all the trials of youth and continue to endear themselves to millions of loyal readers in this latest collection of their shenanigans.

With the help of his faithful stuffed tiger companion and his alter egos—Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Tracer Bullet—Calvin continues to navigate the tricky waters of youth.

This latest assembly of Calvin and Hobbes' adventures has never been collected in book form before.

This is the moving and powerful account of two remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect.

Alex Kotlowitz provides a meticulous portrait of urban poverty, showing the heroism required to survive, let alone escape.

Pan Tadeusz is an epic tale of country life among the Polish and Lithuanian gentry during the years 1811-1812. Written by Adam Mickiewicz, it is perhaps Poland's best-known literary work and has been translated into almost every European language.

This bilingual edition features Kenneth R. Mackenzie's celebrated English translation. The plot encompasses the typical elements of a romantic, historical novel: a feud between two ancient families, a love story crossed by the feud, and a mysterious figure who dominates the action. Additionally, it includes a host of eccentric subordinate characters, humorously depicted.

To Poles of all generations, the life, the scenes, and the characters in Pan Tadeusz embody the ideals, sentiments, and way of life of the whole nation.

Now available in mass market, the revised, definitive edition of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classic. In this second book in the saga set 3,000 years after the terrible war, Ender Wiggin is reviled by history as the Xenocide--the destroyer of the alien Buggers. Now, Ender tells the true story of the war and seeks to stop history from repeating itself.

...In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War.Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening...again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery...and the truth.

Speaker for the Dead, the second novel in Orson Scott Card's Ender Quintet, is the winner of the 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1987 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Tandia sat waiting anxiously for the fight to begin between the man she loved the most in the world and the man she hated the most in the world.

Tandia is a child of Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent. She is only sixteen when she is first brutalized by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to join the black resistance movement, where she trains as a terrorist.

With her in the fight for justice is the one white man Tandia can trust, the welterweight champion of the world, Peekay. Now he must fight their common enemy in order to save both their lives.

The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the rise of the modern department store in late nineteenth-century Paris. The store serves as a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family. It is emblematic of changes in consumer culture, as well as shifts in sexual attitudes and class relations at the end of the century.

This new translation of the eleventh novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle captures the spirit of one of his greatest works. Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life, as much as in business, he is the great seducer. However, when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only salesgirl who refuses to be commodified.

One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village.

Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante.

Out of their struggle, Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

Dick at his wildest and strangest - a mystifying but brilliant book - SF: 100 Best Novels

In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the drug Can-D, which enables users to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. It is far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent state of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch.

Cover illustration: Chris Moore

In a Pennsylvania meadow, a young fireman and an angry gambler are forced to build a wall of fifteenth-century stone. For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan.

With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.

Roxanne and Pepper are a teenage couple with problems. They leave their small town for a weekend to try and solve them. They don't really succeed, and when they return home, they find their town empty.

They call other towns. They find the whole world empty.

But eventually, they discover three other kids their age who are still alive in the town. They cannot imagine why the five of them seem to be the only ones left of the entire human race. They have only one thing in common. They were each directly or indirectly involved in the death of Betty Sue - the plain, shy girl who committed suicide only a short time ago. Betty Sue - the quiet, brilliant girl who wrote short stories about each of them. Stories of hate, of revenge, of death in a dead world.

It makes them wonder who Betty Sue really was. Or what Betty Sue was.

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..." This is a record of hate far more than of love, writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.

In a poor, remote section of Southern Mexico, the paramilitary group, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest is on the run. Too human for heroism, too humble for martyrdom, the nameless little worldly “whiskey priest” is nevertheless impelled toward his squalid Calvary as much by his own compassion for humanity as by the efforts of his pursuers.

In his introduction, John Updike calls The Power and the Glory, “Graham Greene’s masterpiece…. The energy and grandeur of his finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist.”

And Then There Were None begins with ten individuals, a curious assortment of strangers, summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal—and a secret that will seal their fate, as each has been marked for murder.

A famous nursery rhyme is framed and hung in every room of the mansion, gradually becoming a chilling prophecy as one by one, the guests fall prey to a diabolical scheme. As the number of survivors diminishes, terror mounts. Who has choreographed this dastardly plot? And who will be left to tell the tale?

With a backdrop of an isolated island and the stormy weather trapping them, the characters must face the reality that the killer is among them, and nowhere is safe. This masterful tale of suspense leaves readers questioning, until the very end, who the murderer is.

Cancer Ward examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances, and also reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes.

The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Solzhenitsyn himself became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered. Translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg.

Collected for the first time, here are the twelve extraordinary illustrated volumes that form the graphic novel of The Vampire Lestat. Evocative full-color paintings and an artful abridgment of the original text capture the inimitable spirit and atmosphere of this passionate, complex, and thrilling tale.

The story begins in our own time with Lestat, tall, blond, and handsome, a world-renowned rock star. His gifts are timeless, his youth never withers. But he was not always the powerful and famous child of darkness. Before his long earth-encrusted sleep, he was an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-Revolutionary France. It was then that he came face-to-face with the incarnation of evil and the temptations of love that he has ravenously pursued through time.

Where it has led him and what he has become is the heart of the tale that has captured millions of readers.

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, offers an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction.

It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes—wily, energetic, a man of shady origins—quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

Long before there was Harry Potter, there was Nita Callahan and her friend Kit. Nita doesn't have a highly significant scar on her forehead, nor does she live with abusive adoptive parents. She's a perfectly ordinary girl living with her perfectly amiable family (well, her younger sister, Dairine, is impossible, but that's the way younger sisters are) on Long Island, where she goes to public school and has problems with the class bully.

Then one day she runs across one of those little books that help young people decide on a career: So You Want To Be a Doctor; So You Want To Be a Plumber; So You Want To Be a Wizard... Nita can't resist. She takes it home; she studies it; she recites the Wizard's Oath she finds inside—and she finds herself launched on a whole series of dangerously magical adventures. They take her to the depths of the ocean, to the moon and beyond, and to other dimensions entirely. She meets and befriends (and sometimes does battle with) wizards of all sorts and species. And every so often she, Kit and Dairine save the universe.

On opposing sides, Captain Cordelia Naismith and Admiral Lord Aral Vorkosigan marry and live in aristocratic splendor on his home planet Barrayar. Cordelia agrees with the dying old emperor that the Empire would be better if Aral would serve, but he knows secrets she does not.

Captain Cordelia Naismith was sick of combat and betrayal, and looking forward to a quiet life on Barrayar as the wife of Lord Aral Vorkosigan. But her new husband has become Regent to the five-year-old boy who has succeeded to the throne of three planets, making Aral and his family targets in the deadly game of Barrayaran political intrigue.

Il primo libro di narrativa di Baricco: il romanzo è ambientato nell'Ottocento, in una cittadina immaginaria, Quinnipak. È generoso nel presentare storie e personaggi, ciascuno con i suoi sogni e caratteri. E tra questi ci sono il signore e la signora Rail, che si amano di un amore tutto loro, e il bambino Penth con il suo amico Pekisch, e due bande che partono dagli estremi del paese per incontrarsi.

La narrazione è costruita come un montaggio cinematografico e orchestrata come una partitura musicale.

It all started with a mysterious and seemingly innocent postcard, but from that point nothing was to remain the same in the life of Griffin Moss, a quiet, solitary artist living in London. His logical, methodical world was suddenly turned upside down by a strangely exotic woman living on a tropical island thousands of miles away.

Who is Sabine? How can she "see" what Griffin is painting when they have never met? Is she a long-lost twin? A clairvoyant? Or a malevolent angel? Are we witnessing the flowering of a magical relationship or a descent into madness?

This stunning visual novel unfolds in a series of postcards and letters, all brilliantly illustrated with whimsical designs, bizarre creatures, and darkly imagined landscapes. Inside the book, Griffin and Sabine's letters are to be found nestling in their envelopes, permitting the reader to examine the intimate correspondence of these inexplicably linked strangers.

This truly innovative novel combines a strangely fascinating story with lush artwork in an altogether original format.