As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from post-war Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft -- and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark. Views: 657
When Pierre-Anthon realizes there is no meaning to life, the seventh-grader leaves his classroom, climbs a tree, and stays there. His classmates cannot make him come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to Pierre-Anthon that life has meaning, the children decide to give up things of importance. The pile starts with the superficial—a fishing rod, a new pair of shoes. But as the sacrifices become more extreme, the students grow increasingly desperate to get Pierre-Anthon down, to justify their belief in meaning. Sure to prompt intense thought and discussion, Nothing—already a treasured work overseas—is not to be missed. Views: 656
After spending twenty years hunting and
bringing to justice devious, and deliberate murderers with the Criminal
Investigation Division of the Army, Major Lynne Fhaolain had decided to retire
to the high, quiet mountains in Colorado.
Early retirement and the unexpected death
of her partner leave Lynne trying to hang on and build a new life by moving to
Leadville, Colorado. She wants to stay busy and focused on the opening of
a small bookshop and getting her secondary career as a travel book writer off
to a running start.
As she makes her way to her new home in
the old mining town, a killer emerges from the community to prey on
unsuspecting tourists and locals alike.
Befriended by two old town cronies, Lynne
finds herself privy to more information about the murders than she wanted to
know. Against her better judgment, Lynne finds herself teased and taunted by
the mystery posed as the force of old habits return.
Unfortunately, the murderer notices
Lynne’s habits of curiosity. Murder in Cloud City goes into high gear as hunter
and hunted circle in for the kill.
Views: 655
A moving story of a brother, a sister and a swallow, and how all are in some way victims of the horrors of landmines.Olly’s brother Matt wants to go and work with children who have been made orphans, through war, in Africa. He wants to be a clown and make them laugh. His mother and sister want him to stay in England and go to university.Hero, a swallow, has a journey to make too. He must fly to Africa for the winter to join all the other swallows. His journey is difficult and fraught with danger.Three separate stories are woven into one powerful and moving novel whose central theme not only exposes the horrors of war and of landmines, but also the endurance of the human spirit.
Michael divides his time between his writing and running Farms for City Children, a charity which each year takes up to 3,000 children to a working farm for a week. Michael and his wife Clare were awarded MBEs this year for their work with the charity. Before the first farm opened 22 years ago, Morpurgo was a teacher and his knowledge of children’s experiences, plus his experience of Farms enrich his writing enormously.Michael Morpurgo has won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and the Smarties Book Prize. Views: 651
Romantic suspense, originally published by Silhouette Intimate Moments. The last book in the Mackenzie Family series focuses on Chance Mackenzie, a feral, homeless adolescent until rescued and adopted by Wolf and Mary Mackenzie. The stunning and aloof half-breed has built a career in undercover ops, first as a Naval Intelligence Officer, then as a private consultant. However, one particularly vile terrorist has always eluded the law. Chance and brother Zane find a way to lure Crispin Hauer in: They'll use his daughter Sonia as bait. First step: Make Sunny fall in love with Chance. What could be simpler?
Content: Explicit sex, violence, swearing Views: 651
This is an evocation of the woman who married Chairman Mao and fought to succeed him. The unwanted daughter of a concubine, she refused to have her feet bound, ran away to join an opera troupe and eventually met Mao Zedong in the mountains of Yenan. Views: 651
A relief from the recent. The Nylon Pirates, this takes its story from the mid-nineteenth century and the East, on a possible island, Makassang, in the Java Seas. Richard Marriott has wandered ten years as a disillusioned freebooter after his father's death in England has revealed him a pauper and a bastard and lost him the woman he had loved; now his ""private"" warship with its trained crew of fighting seamen has gone aground on a reef off Makassang. Richard is summoned to the Rajah whose threats and promise of money cause Richard to accept the offer to drive out insurgents under an old enemy, Black Harris. Successful, he is adopted by the Rajah and given his daughter, Princess Sunara, in marriage. Two more victories in other uprisings and the birth of a son keep Richard in favor but when restiessness and inactivity spur him to plan for a model kingdom he is accused of treason and ostracized. An immediate threat to his life is averted when HM warship arrives with Richard's half-brother in command and, through his support, when the Rajah is killed, Richard becomes the new Rajah with the chance of fulfilling his dreams for his little country. Eastern backgrounds, issues of the past that echo today, romance and torture, keep this popular on all counts Views: 649
When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common, until they meet a runaway -- a girl-woman named Lottie Parker -- on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness.
Foster will marry her and father her son.
Ben will escort her home.
And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets, from the day she runs away until she finally finds the place where she belongs. Views: 649
It started long ago, in a tower at the Eye of Time, as a war between the shadowy Immortals who came long ago. Tristen is a Shaping, both more and less than human, who turned back sorcery's tides in the legendary battle of Lewenbrook that brought his friend Cefwyn the burden of a kingdom, and the light of love. Now the Lines that hold the world in place are shifting once again, and Cefwyn's peril is Tristen's call to arms. But even Tristen's double-edged sword cannot cut through the knot of this new challenge, for he is facing more than a mere pretender to his friend's throne. Views: 647
In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life.
Both gritty and surreal, A Friend of the Earth represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career-his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with genuine compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect from his work. Views: 646
Time and again, Tom Clancy's novels have been praised not only for their big-scale drama and propulsive narrative drive but for their cutting-edge prescience in predicting future events.
In The Bear and the Dragon, the future is very near at hand indeed.
Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier: domestic pitfalls await him at every turn; there's a revolution in Liberia; the Asian economy is going down the tubes; and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR--the former KGB--with a rocket-propelled grenade. Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the potential assassins. Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, or disaffected former KGB? Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here?
Ryan is right. For even while he dispatches his most trusted eyes and ears, including black ops specialist John Clark, to find out the truth of the matter, forces in China are moving ahead with a plan of truly audacious proportions. If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same. If they fail...the consequences will be unspeakable.
Blending the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his hallmarks with intricate plotting, razor-sharp suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters, this is Clancy at his best--and there is none better. Views: 645
After years of comparative peace, darkness has fallen upon Ulster. Trouble is brewing and even those in the heart of the forest are not safe. Niamh, elder daughter of Sorcha, is required to make a strategic marriage, while her sister Liadan, who has the gift of Sight and her mother’s talent for healing, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of the Painted Man and his warrior band. There Liadan begins a journey that is to transform her life. Views: 643
Gene Wolfe is producing the most significant body of short fiction of any living writer in the SF genre. It has been ten years since the last major Wolfe collection, so Strange Travelers contains a whole decade of achievement. Some of these stories were award nominees, some were controversial, but each is unique and beautifully written.
Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, this collection of Wolfe's stories published in the 1990s contains death by overdose, suicide, Armageddon, cruelty to animals, abuse of children, children willing to falsely accuse fathers of sexual abuse and a plethora of vampiric female figures eager to suck the life out of men. Opening with "Bluesberry Jam," Wolfe (The Book of the Long Sun series, etc.) creates an intriguing speculative future in which an entire culture arises from people who have been stuck in a traffic jam for decades. This conceit is ultimately negated, however, by the most tired of clich?s in the closing story, "Ain't You 'Most Done," which is set in the same world. Also included are two Christmas stories: "No Planets Strike," a relatively sweet tale in which genetically modified animals aid the next Christ child, and "And When They Appear," which is less sweet, involving wonderful, mythic figures who visit, but cannot save, a small boy from a world gone mad. While Wolfe's prose is exceptional and there are a few gems here, such as "Useful Phrases," which delights in how words lead us to and reveal mysteries, there are also several tasteless and misogynistic entries. Chief among them is "The Ziggurat," in which a mother coaches her daughters in the art of false accusation and the father--whose wife leaves him broke-eventually regains all by finding a woman he can dominate and a technology he can steal. All too frequently in this volume, even when women show men "the pleasures of Hell," biting them till they bleed, men emerge loutish and triumphant. (Jan.) FYI: Wolfe is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
From Library Journal
Two tales featuring a pair of musicians wandering down an endless highway filled with stalled cars ("Bluesberry Jam"; "Ain't You Most Done?") frame this collection of 15 short stories by the award-winning author of the "Book of the New Sun" series. Wolfe's eclectic talent runs the gamut from Russian folk tales to modern horror as he explores a landscape filled with ghouls, aliens, and chess-playing deities. Representing a decade of groundbreaking speculative fiction by a master of the genre, this volume belongs in most libraries.
From Booklist
Wolfe's latest collection holds 16 pieces that have appeared in an amazing variety of publications during the last decade. Their inspirations range from music in "Bluesberry Jam" to comic books in "Ain't You Most Done?," a tie-in to Neil Gaiman's famous Sandman series of graphic novels, which are about as far removed from caped-crusader stuff as one can imagine. But then, Wolfe occupies a distinguished position on the frontiers of both sf and fantasy by virtue of originality of subject, capable handling of detail, and command of language. Plot summaries don't do his work justice, but the only caveat to make is that some of the protagonists are initially repulsive, and at short length, there isn't much time to assimilate their complexities. Roland Green
From Kirkus Reviews
Fifteen stories, 199097, all more or less unclassifiable, gathered under an eminently appropriate title: Wolfe's first collection since Endangered Species (1989). The more science fictionflavored entries include: a woman pursued by the robot she helped develop; a collapse-of-civilization yarn about a little boy abandoned in a computerized house; and a strange trio of time-traveling female invaders. Yarns leaning toward fantasy: a far-future campfire horror story; an amusing yarn based on a Russian folk tale; an excruciating dilemma on the road to Hell; a human boy enslaved by the queen of the ghouls; some weird goings-on in a magic dollhouse; and, in a knottily Borgesian yarn, a phrase-book for an unknown language draws odd visitors to an old-fashioned bookshop. Elsewhere, there are two talking-animal clowns trapped on a planet where humans are oppressed by alien elves; a strange school in a low-tech future where a dead man thinks in Latin; and a space war controlled by God's chess game with the Devil. Finally, in the last story, a man, deprived of dreams in life, dies, only to become a character in the lead-off yarn about a permanent traffic jam that's developed a culture of its own. Painstaking and precise, though often wrought without recourse to ordinary logic: for readers who enjoy oblique, magisterial puzzles that don't necessarily have solutions. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"The greatest writer in the English language alive today . . . there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning."--Michael Swanwick
"Aladdin got three wishes from his genie. From Gene, you get fifteen, and they all come true."--Orson Scott Card
About the Author
Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has written numerous books and won a variety of awards for his SF writing. Gene is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and many other awards. In 2007, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He lives in Barrington, Illinois. Views: 643
Twisting the buddy cop story upside down and inside out, Penn Jillette has created the most distinctive narrator to come along in fiction in many years: a sock monkey called Dickie. The sock monkey belongs to a New York City police diver who discovers the body of an old lover in the murky waters of the Hudson River and sets off with her best friend to find her killer. The story of their quest swerves and veers, takes off into philosophical riffs, occasionally stops to tell a side story, and references a treasure trove of 1970's and 1980's pop culture. Sock is a surprising, intense, fascinating piece of work. Views: 639
