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The Red Wolf Conspiracy | null | 2,008 | The novel begins with a special notice from the Etherhorde Mariner, announcing that the IMS Chathrand has mysteriously vanished at sea on a voyage to transport Thasha Isiq to a political wedding to bring peace to the two competing empires of northwest Alifros. Pazel Pathkendel is a young tarboy who is stranded in Etherhorde by a mysterious Dr. Chadfallow. He manages to find work on the Chathrand, but his special power to understand any language attracts the attention of several stowaway Ixchel. The Ixchel warn Pazel that if he tells anyone of their presence, they will kill him, because sailors hate Ixchel and have developed ways of smoking them out of ships. Thasha arrives on the Chathrand with her father and household. When Pazel has a fit due to the negative side effect of his power, he bumps into Thasha and she takes him to his cabin. There, Pazel meets Ramanchi, a wizard from another world, who grants Pazel three words of great power. However, when Pazel insults Thasha's father, who sacked Pazel's hometown, Pazel is expelled from the ship. As the voyage progresses, it becomes clear something is not right. Chadfallow had previously warned Pazel not to sail on the Chathrand, only to sail on it himself, the captain writes letters to his dead father, the Ixchel notice that several rats on board the ship have awakened and have declared a holy war against the captain, a man attacks Thasha's bodyguard only to be saved by the unassuming Mr. Kett, and Thasha feels that her father's mistress is not entirely trustworthy. There is also talk of someone trying to find the 'Red Wolf,' and the 'Nilstone.' It is revealed the voyage is merely a coverup so that Mr. Kett, who is really a sorcerer, can bring the Shaggat back to power. As the ship comes to the haunted coast Mr. Kett leads an expedition out to the coast to find the Red Wolf where the Nilstone is hidden. Pazel, who has made his way back to the Chathrand, is part of the expedition, as well as Thasha. Mr. Kett manages to raise the Nilstone from the depths, and returns to the ship to bring it to the Shaggat. However, Pazel uses one of his words to turn the Shaggat to stone, preventing Mr. Kett's plans from coming into fruition. Captain Nilius Rose declares that after Thasha's wedding the Chathrand will head out to sea, never to return. |
Freddy and the Bean Home News | null | null | On a cold March morning, Charles the rooster malingers about going outside to crow. His attempts to avoid work actually make him too sick to do work. Freddy convinces the Bean animals to join in the neighborhood scrap drive contest, finding unneeded metal to help win the war. Freddy takes news input to the newspaper offices of the Guardian to discover that his friend, the editor Mr. Dimsey, has been fired. The owner of the paper, Mrs. Underdunk, put her nephew Mr. Garble in charge. With Dimsey’s help, Freddy starts another paper The Bean Home News, for the animals. The Bean animals work on Dimsey’s farm to pay for his time. Unexpectedly, several people in town have subscribed. This prompts the pig to hire reporters to collect the news from town. The newspapers come into confrontation when Freddy is accidentally bumped into by Underdunk on the sidewalk. When the sheriff refuses to arrest the pig, Underdunk threatens to use her influence to put him out of office. She comes to the Bean farm, proclaiming that she will have Freddy shot. A joke meant for Charles backfires, further infuriating her. The city reporter for the Bean Home News is collecting great material: :"'Where in tunket did you get that item about Mr. Weezer and Miss Biles being engaged to be married? There wasn’t a soul in town knew about it. I ain’t even sure they knew about it themselves.'" (p. 88) The Guardian calls Freddy a ferocious wild pig. Freddy responds in his paper with the true version of events. Citizens believe Freddy, drawing more threats from Underdunk. Charles the rooster is infuriated, and meeting his reputation from an earlier book, single-handedly attacks Garble. That leads Underdunk to demand Freddy’s arrest as being the head of an animal gang. Freddy hides in his friend the sheriff’s jail, which proves lucky, since when they come to arrest him, the sheriff points out that the pig is already "in custody". When Freddy visits Old Whibley for advice, the owl determines to be Freddy’s lawyer. He instructs Freddy to demand a jury trial, so that his friends will be on the jury. The animals constantly interrupt Garble’s sleep, so that in the courtroom he is on the edge of falling asleep. Underdunk’s case is unconvincing: :"'Did he bite you?' :'No.'.... :'...you immediately called upon the sheriff to lock him up. Why?' :'...That pig cannot be trusted to behave himself." :'Why? Because he did not bite you?'" (p. 156) Garble falls soundly asleep, losing his chance to testify. The jury votes Freddy innocent. When Underdunk throws a gala party including a senator, the Bean animals cannot resist sneaking into the grounds to watch. When they are found, Freddy flees into the house just as a war blackout is called, and the house goes dark. Pretending to be the senator, Freddy announces that Underdunk is donating her prize lawn ornament to the Bean’s scrap drive. In the chaos that follows when the lights come on, Freddy is captured and imprisoned. However the animals find him, and the authorities are notified. The police, sheriff and judge and many from town arrive in a loud mob. :"'Another interruption of that kind,' said the judge severely, 'and I will have this barnyard cleared.'" (p. 208) Having been publicly caught, Underdunk and Garble agree to stop harassing Freddy. Her lawn ornament is given up, and the Bean animals win the scrap drive. |
Stuck In Neutral | null | 2,001 | The book follows Shawn McDaniel's first-person point of view. He is a 14-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, a brain condition. In Shawn's case, his entire body is affected; he has absolutely no control over any of his bodily functions. Shawn's condition is a major part of the story. In the first few chapters, Shawn McDaniel explains to the reader his condition. He includes what he feels to be positive sides of his condition, such as his perfect memory. Shawn remembers every experience, every sensation, and everything he's ever learned from school or television. Shawn introduces his family to the reader. His mother is his main caretaker and his father is a writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize for a poem about Shawn. The main story is about euthanasia. Shawn feels that his father, Sydney McDaniel, is trying to kill him. Sydney constantly talks about euthanasia. On an interview during a Jerry Springer-style show Sydney interviews a man who killed his son with a similar condition. Shawn frequently expresses that he dislikes being talked down to as if he were a baby. He stresses throughout the novel that he is just as intelligent, or more intelligent, than others around him. |
Fablehaven: Keys to the Demon Prison | Brandon Mull | 2,010 | Kendra, Seth, and the Knights of the Dawn continue to take the last possible steps to safeguard the keys and locks placed on Zzyzx. Seth was taken captive to a preserve unknown to the world. However, as a result of a certain attempt, the Society gained all the keys to the demon prison. With this added worry, as Kendra finds out, comes some advantages previously unimaginable. Kendra gains two new allies and finds an old friend during her extremely short visit in the same cell as her brother had been. The three, Kendra, Warren, and Bracken, take the very last, final steps to prevent the demon horde from escaping. After retreating over the preserve's wall, the three race to beat the Society to the final locks that hold Zzyzx shut. Their problem: they would be trapped inside the preserve without outside help. Their troubles include a tempting yet lethal grove of trees, a roc parent, and some furious harpies. On his journey, Bracken finds an "old friend." Meanwhile, Seth is coping with a friend's death and a betrayal back at Fablehaven. Patton Burgess, in a gaseous form, suggests some truly desperate ideas to oppose the demon horde. Seth must call upon his loyalty, devotion, and his unique traits to gain a powerful weapon, a remnant from an age of wonders that may save the world. When all of the demon prison's locks were undone, the hour had arrived to unite. They all meet up at the place where the ship Lady Luck will take them to Shoreless Isle. They use the items to summon the Lady Luck. Seth uses force to convince the ghost of the Lady Luck to take them there. They find a Fairy Queen Shrine near Zzyzx. Kendra and Bracken speak once more to the Fairy Queen, who tells them that she has destroyed all of her other shrines, and they have one final secret plan that may just grant success. The astrids' dream comes true. Bracken needed the five artifacts, so Seth, some astrids, and the Sphinx transport into the dome and reclaim the artifacts. After a success on the battlefield, Kendra, Seth, and all creatures of Light must wait to see whether Bracken's plan would work and whether the world would live to see a dawning of a new age of security, when Kendra can finally find peace and joy and reclaim a life even better than the one that was stolen from her. |
Measle and the Dragodon | null | 2,004 | The novel is about a boy called Measle who has been recently reunited with his parents, Sam and Lee Stubbs. On a day out they visit the Isle of Smiles, a theme park, and from then on things take a turn for the worse. Lee is captured by wrathmonks (warlocks that have gone mad) and taken to the Isle of Smiles. Sam has his memory wiped, and Measle and his dog, Tinker, are left to their own devices to find and rescue their parents. Once Measle reaches the Isle of Smiles, the wrathmonks cast a spell that causes all the creatures in the theme park to come alive and attempt to kill him. After he has successfully run away from the creatures, the wrathmonks catch him and want to kill him, but their leader, a dragodon, orders them to take him to a ride which leads into the dragon's lair. After a fight with the dragon and the dragodon, Measle and his mother escape and get back to their house where after a short fight the wrathmonks are defeated. |
Transition | Iain Banks | 2,009 | Set between the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the 2008 financial crisis, Transition centres on a shadowy organisation called 'The Concern' (also known as 'L'Expédience'), and how the workings of this organisation affect the lives of the novel's multiple narrators and characters. Banks uses the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics theory to imagine "infinitudes" of parallel realities, between which The Concern's agents–known as Transitionaries–can "flit", intervening in events to produce what The Concern sees as beneficial outcomes for that world. Transitioning, or flitting, is only possible for people with a predisposed talent for such movement, who may only flit after ingesting a mysterious drug called 'septus'. When a Transitionary flits into another world, he or she temporarily takes control of the body of an existing inhabitant of that world, along with some of that body's residual idiosyncrasies (such as personality disorders and sexual preferences). |
Kangazang! | null | 2,010 | After Jeff's break up with his fiancee he embarks on a journey with Ray, his barber- an alien that has been stranded on Earth and finally repaired his spacecraft, the 'Marshmallow Penguin', to leave the planet. The journey leads Jeff and Ray to a planet of amazonian women, simple minded men and living space hoppers where they are tasked with retrieving the 'Universal Remote', a device for altering the very fabric of the universe. |
The Alabaster Staff | null | null | A young street performer is drawn into a twisting plot of double-crossings and betrayals, at the center of which is the artifact of great power known as the Alabaster Staff. |
The Black Bouquet | Richard Lee Byers | null | A rogue becomes involved in a game where he thought no one would get hurt, trusting a tanarukk bandit and hired for his still and cunning, but turns an entire city against him. |
The Crimson Gold | null | null | This novel is set in Thay. A rogue wanted out, wanted a new life and a trophy worthy of a master thief - the source of the treasured crimson gold. She wanted to face an undead emperor on his home ground, and live to tell the tale. |
The Yellow Silk | Don Bassingthwaite | 2,004 | The novel follows the adventures of Kuang Li Chien, an easterner from the country of Shou Lung, and Tychoben Arisaenn, a minor bard who lives in the seedy port town of Spandeliyon, Altumbel. Li Chien arrives in Spandeliyon on an important family mission to find his eldest brother, Yu Mao, who disappeared when the Shou trading expedition he headed was attacked by the Sow, a notorious pirate ship. His only lead is the pirate ship's first mate, a cruel halfling by the name of Brin, who has retired in Spandeliyon. Seeking information about his whereabouts at a dockside tavern called the Wench's Ease, Li Chien meets Tycho, who is playing that night. The two clash immediately, but despite their differences, Tycho tries to warn Li Chien against inquiring too insistently about Brin. Ignoring his warnings, Li Chien leaves the tavern with a local man named Lander, who claims he can help him find the ex-pirate... |
Missing Person | Patrick Modiano | null | Guy Roland is a detective who, after the retirement of his boss, van Hutte, decides to leave in 1965 to find his own identity, which he lost after a mysterious accident fifteen years earlier that left him an amnesiac. Ascending the slopes of his tenuous past that seems to stop during the Second World War, he learns that he is called Jimmy Pedro Stern, a Greek Jew from Salonica living in Paris under an assumed name, Pedro McEvoy, and working for the legation of the Dominican Republic. This McEvoy Pedro was surrounded by friends: Denise Coudreuse a French model who shares his life, Freddie Howard Luz of Mauritius, Gay Orlov an American dancer of Russian origin, André Wildmer a former English jockey, who all decided in 1940 to get to Megeve to flee a Paris that had become more oppressive during the German occupation. Denise and Pedro had decided to flee to Switzerland, and paid a smuggler who abandoned them in the mountain, separating them and leaving them only lost in the snow. Guy Roland decides to leave France to try to trace Freddie, who went live in Polynesia after the war. When he arrives in Bora Bora, he learns that Freddie has disappeared, either lost at sea or by choice. The last link that remains for Guy Pedro Stern to track is an address that he held in 1930. |
Vampirates: Empire of Night | Justin Somper | 2,010 | Sidorio, fuelled by grief and revenge, is intent on becoming King of the Vampirates and building a new empire to bring terror to the oceans. He faces growing opposition from both the Pirate Federation, including Vampirate Assassin Cheng Li, and the Nocturnals - the more benign vampirate realm - led by Mosh Zu and Lorcan Furey. Both the pecker and the Nocturnals are forced to raise their game in response to the new and urgent threat from Sidorio and the renegade Vampirates. Twins Grace and Connor Tempest, still ricocheting from the recent discovery of their true parenthood and its explosive implications, are thrust deep into the heart of the conflict. Old foes and allies are thrown together in unexpected ways and, as the stakes rise higher than ever before, Grace and Connor find their alliances shifting in ways no-one could ever have possibly foreseen… |
Alex Cross's Trial | James Patterson | 2,008 | From his grandmother, Nana Mama, Alex Cross has been told the story of his great uncle Abraham and his struggle throughout the era of the Ku Klux Klan. Alex then recounts this tale to his children though his novel called Trial. A lawyer at the turn of the century, a man named Ben Corbett, represents the toughest cases. Many of his cases are opposing racism and oppression, and because of the cases he's fighting for, he risks the life of his wife and children. When President Roosevelt asks Ben personally to go to his hometown to investigate upon rumors of the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence, he cannot refuse. Upon entering Eudora, Mississippi, Corbett meets Abraham Cross and his enchanting granddaughter Moody. He enlists their help and the two Crosses introduce Corbett to the other side of the idyllic southern town. Lynchings have become commonplace in the town, and the black residents of the town live in constant fear. Ben aims to break the reign of terror, but finding out who is behind it all may break his heart. |
Dinosaur vs. Bedtime | null | null | The plot of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime centers around a young dinosaur that takes on many challenges, including adults, brushing his teeth, taking a bath, and eating spaghetti. The dinosaur takes on all the challenges put before, defeating them all by roaring at them, until he comes up against his final (or "biggest") challenge, bedtime. In the end "bedtime wins" and the dinosaur goes to sleep. The dinosaur is used in the story to represent a stubborn child who does not want to go to bed. who utilized mixed media including crayon, paint and photography. |
Ship of Destiny | Robin Hobb | 2,000 | Ship of Destiny continues where The Mad Ship left off and reveals some of the secrets that were hinted at in the first book and second books. The dragon, Tintaglia, released from her wizardwood coffin, flies high over the Rain Wild River, whilst below her, Reyn and Selden have been left to drown. Malta, the High Satrap of all Jamaillia and his servant attempt to navigate the acid flow of the dangerous river in a decomposing boat. Althea and Brashen are finally at sea together, sailing the liveship Paragon into pirate waters to rescue the Vestrit family liveship, Vivacia, stolen by the pirate king, Kennit; but there is mutiny brewing in their ragtag crew, and in the mind of the mad ship itself, and all the whilst the waters around the Vivacia are seething with giant serpents, following the liveship as it sails on to its destiny. ru:Корабль судьбы |
Os Velhos Marinheiros ou o Capitão de Longo Curso | Jorge Amado | 1,961 | Arriving in Periperi is Vasco Moscoso Aragão, Master Mariner. With his stories of the sea, distant and exotic ports and women both exotic and sensual, all the town's inhabitants become envious of the commander, with the sole exception of Chico Pacheco—who does not believe him, and thinks that he is a braggart. After some investigation in Salvador, Chico returns with his version of events: Vasco is a wealthy businessman who lived a bohemian life in his youth with a group of friends, and who then took the title of commander to satisfy his desire to have a title and not simply be known as "Mr. Vasco". The friends of Vasco give him the title of sea captain with the rank of commander, and even award him a medal, obtained illegally. Vasco identifies herself so strongly with his role that he starts to wear official uniforms complete with medals, smoking his pipe, and collecting sea objects. In old age he moves to Periperi. Now the two versions of Vasco's life, the commander's and Chico Pacheco's, divide the town into those who believe in the commander and those who believe him to be a boastful liar. Fate leads Vasco Moscoso to command a ship sailing from Salvador to Belém, stopping in various ports along the coast. The commander also decides to show his friends of Periperi that he is a real sea captain. The trip takes place without incident; in fact, Vasco leaves the management to the second officer. But upon arrival in the state of Parà in Belém, the second officer makes fun of the commander, asking him how many ropes are required to moor the vessel in port, saying it is a maritime tradition that the master decides how to moor the ship. Undecided, the commander says all the ropes, and laughter erupts on the ship in the port and across Belém. Realizing his mistake, Vasco takes refuge in a cheap boarding house, gets drunk on cachaça, and falls asleep deeply saddened and disappointed. But that night the city of Belem endures the most violent storm that anyone has ever seen, leaving roofless houses, corpses, destroyed plantations, and a ruined port. All ships are damaged or drifting except for the ship of Captain Vasco Moscoso Aragão, which remains intact and durable, just as it docked. The commander returns victorious to Periperi, honored by awards and acclaimed by all the newspapers; the citizens who had previously defamed him are now his most ardent fans. The dream of the commander can continue. |
Project 17 | null | 2,007 | The Danvers State Hospital. Located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the building was built in 1878, and condemned in 1992. It is rumored by locals to be the birthplace of the pre frontal Lobotomy. The novel begins at 7 AM, with Derik riding up to the Danvers State Hospital in his car. Looking at the crumbling brick building, he starts to think of the people that were locked up in there, the people who died after spending their lives there. The unmarked mass graves around the premises, the underground tunnels, and the messed up remnants of its former patients. He knows this is the place. The place where he'd make his movie. Derik is flunking out of school, and he decides to submit his film to a contest and save himself from a future of flipping burgers at his parents' diner. He gathers a cast of different backgrounds, and the eve before the hospitals' demolition, they break in. He gets more than he bargained for when the eerie experience changes his life. Forever. |
Fair Land, Fair Land | Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. | null | Fair Land, Fair Land begins where The Way West ends, with Dick Summers riding away from the group of "wagon-train people" he has guided from Independence to Oregon, but Summers leaves without saying goodbye and while the settlers are still sleeping. As a mountain man traveling light, all Summers carries is his Hawken rifle, "his old Green River knife, some ammunition and a small sack of possibles." As he rides Summers remembers the events of The Big Sky of about fifteen years before when he was the hunter for a French trading expedition traveling up the Missouri in a keelboat to Blackfeet country, a trip that ended with the Blackfeet killing all the Frenchmen and only the three friends Summers, Boone Caudill, and Jim Deakins escaping. Summers meets and shares a jug with a man who mentions having encountered Boone Caudill, "The broodiest bastard I ever see. Turn on you for nothin'." Caudill admitted to the man that he killed his best friend, Jim Deakins, for fathering a child with Teal Eye, Caudill's Blackfoot "squaw." Dick Summers re-encounters a band of his settlers that had separated from the main group in order to drive their stock by land while the main group had finished by river. In the band is Hezekiah "Hig" Higgins. Hig idolizes Summers and Summers has seen throughout The Way West what a valuable man Hig is. Higgins and Summers join together and spend most of the rest of Fair Land, Fair Land together, first as nomadic mountain men in an idyllic type of life that is rapidly disappearing and then as relatively settled men living with Indian wives. Summers meets Teal Eye again, becomes her mate, and adopts her blind son, who in Indian fashion has been given a descriptive name, "Nocansee." Summers and Teal Eye have another son, Lije, and are ultimately able to have a white marriage ceremony, conducted by their friend Brother Potter. Nocansee was a red-headed baby, but was the natural son of Boone Caudill, who years before had killed his red-headed best friend, Jim Deakins, because Caudill wrongly thought Teal Eye had cheated on him with Deakins. Dick Summers and Teal Eye arrange for Hig to marry a Shoshone chief's granddaughter, Little Wing, and the ceremony is performed by Summers. The years pass. Hig and Little Wing never have children. Summers forces Lije to leave him and Teal Eye with Brother Potter because Summers sees the end coming for their native American way of life and that Lije must become educated in how to live in a white world. Higgins learns that Boone Caudill will be passing through the area on his way to hunt gold in California and tells Summers. When Summers meets Caudill on the trail and confronts him with the facts that Caudill unjustly killed his best friend, Caudill leaps on Summers and attempts to strangle him. Although he has his knife in his hand and will die if Caudill continues the throttling, Summers cannot bring himself to stab. He is losing consciousness when he hears a shot—Hig has killed Caudill and afterward says, "He didn't mean nothin' to me." A.B. Guthrie writes of the white destruction of the Eden of Montana. For example, greedy white men discover gold in Alder Gulch, resulting in despoiling of the area, corruption, and violence. Or, one afternoon Dick Summers hears a shot and discovers that a boy has gut-shot Summers's best horse, thinking he was shooting an elk or a deer. The horse is suffering, but having caused so much damage the foolish but sorry boy cannot bring himself to complete the job—"I couldn't ... not a horse." Summers is forced to shoot the horse. Higgins and Little Wing leave Summers and Teal Eye to return to Little Wing's Shoshone people. Dick Summers, Teal Eye, and Nocansee are living in the village of the Blackfoot chief Heavy Runner when the Indian agency orders all the Blackfeet chiefs to a meeting because of Indian horse stealing and a recent Indian killing of a white man. Heavy Runner asks Dick Summers to go with him to speak for the Indians. Running the meeting are two men: General Sully, the superintendent of Indian Affairs, and U.S. Marshal Wheeler. The only Blackfeet to have shown up are peaceful ones, and the band that committed the worst crimes, including the recent murder, doesn't appear. Summers is surprised to find his son Lije standing behind Sully and Wheeler, ill-at-ease as part of the Army and as their interpreter. The fruitless meeting concludes with General Sully telling the chiefs that they must surrender the killers of the white man and return the stolen stock. After the Army's time limit has passed with no surrender of murderers and no return of stock, officers plan "A secret mission, a stealing out to kill Blackfeet, a surprise attack." The meeting, at which Lije is deliberately degraded to be a servant pouring whiskey, is conducted by Major Baker, perhaps the most overtly evil person in the novel: "This time we show them that we mean business. No prisoners ... I swear this is the last time, so bear with me, gentlemen." As Major Baker plans the slaughter of the Blackfeet he acknowledges that in the dawn attack on the villages the January weather will be cold, but "Think of that other enemy, the Blackfeet, all huddled in camp against the cold. ... Sitting ducks." Lije calls him a fool for attacking such chiefs as Heavy Runner, who is friendly and "has a friendship paper" from the government. Major Baker has Lije put in the guardhouse, where, after having thought over his life, Lije reaches between the bars and breaks a window, the implication being that he is getting the glass in order to commit suicide. In the morning several days later, Dick Summers wakes up to someone shouting "Wrong camp" and from the flap of his tepee sees Heavy Runner trot out of his lodge "waving his friendship paper" and be immediately shot down. Summers makes Teal Eye escape through a hole in the rear of their tepee and then sits to await his fate. A soldier looks in and remarks that Summers is a white man. The soldier also sees the nonwhite Nocansee sitting quietly. When Summers tells him that Nocansee is blind, the soldier responds that then he need not waste a bullet and clubs Nocansee to death with the butt of his carbine. Summers shoots the soldier in the forehead with his Hawken, the rifle he has carried and relied upon throughout the trilogy. Two more soldiers come in and shoot Summers as "a turncoat son of a bitch" who "Killed his own kind." The novel ends with Summers drifting into unconsciousness and death, hearing the sounds of the soldiers destroying the village and "the wailing of squaws and the crying of children and the voices of soldiers proud of themselves." |
Ordinary Thunderstorms | William Boyd | null | Adam Kindred is a recently divorced climatologist who has moved back to England. After attending an interview for a Senior Research Fellowship position at Imperial College, London, he goes into an Italian restaurant in Chelsea and briefly encounters Dr Philip Wang, who accidentally leaves a file behind. Adam takes it to his hotel, only to discover that Wang has been murdered with a knife in his body. Before Wang dies, he asks Adam to remove it and so Adam becomes incriminated in his murder. Deciding to take refuge, he shelters in a small patch of gardens on London's Embankment to give himself time to think. He decides to go underground, cutting up all his cards and removing anything that could identify him. He soon leads the life of a tramp, searching in rubbish bins for food and only venturing out at night. In the meantime, he decides to try and find out from the file in his possession why Wang was murdered and if there is any connection to Calenture-Deutz, the pharmaceutical company Wang was working for. Calenture-Deutz is a company set up by Ingram Fryzer who is another of the novel's protagonists. Ingram is married with three children and is about to reap large profits from the introduction of a new anti-asthma drug, Zembla-4, that is just about to be launched onto the market after its clinical trials supervised by Dr Wang. To speed up the search for the killer, the company offers a £100,000 reward. Adam decides to visit St Botolph's hospital to find out more about what Wang was working on. However, he is viciously mugged near the Shaft, a sink estate in Rotherhithe, and is helped by Mhouse, a black prostitute, who gives him the address of the Church of John Christ. He decides to visit the church to get a decent meal and meets some fellow tramps there who are in the same dire situation. Meanwhile, Ingram is having his own troubles - Alfredo Rilke is a major shareholder in his company and he wants to launch Zembla-4 against Ingram's wishes, since he considers it too early. It turns out, unbeknown to Ingram, that Rilke has paid an assassin, Jonjo, to find Adam and the missing file which is vital to Rilke since it contains evidence that is damaging to the new drug. Whilst Adam begins his life as a beggar, posing as a blind man to obtain money from sympathetic people, Jonjo is getting closer to his quarry. He enquiries lead him to the Shaft and he pays to find out where Adam is. He learns where Adam was dropped off by Mhouse and her friend, Mohammed, and waits for Adam at his Embankment hideaway. Fortunately, Adam recognises him from an earlier encounter and decides to rent a room with Mhouse and her young son, Ly-on, paying Mhouse for sex from his begging money. His life becomes more stable until, one evening whilst walking with Ly-on, he passes Jonjo who does not recognise him with his beard and holding the young boy's hand. Adam tells Mhouse he has to leave for Scotland and shacks up with Vladimir, who dies the same night from too much 'monkey'. Adam decides to take on Vlad's fake identity and his new job as a hospital porter at Bethnal & Bow, before he gets a transfer to St Botolph. Here, he is able to establish why there were problems with the Zembla-4 drug. Bad news starts to surround Zembla-4 and Rilke eventually informs Ingram that his proposed takeover of Calenture-Deutz is now off. Ingram has also been feeling strangely ill and it turns out he has a brain tumour that he has removed. Jonjo, having failed to find Kindred, is sacked from his position as a 'security consultant' and is forced to leave the country after realizing that he will be made the fall guy for Philip Wang's murder and that the killers are now after him. Ingram Fryzer realizes that there is something strange about the drug but decides to fit in with Rilke's plans, knowing that he will financially benefit from them. However, he suspects that there is a plot to unseat him and tries to sort out a plan for fighting back. In the meantime, Adam has sorted out a plan for attacking Calenture-Deutz following the death of Mhouse at the hands of Jonjo. He also meets Rita, a policewoman, whilst identifying Mhouse's body and starts to see more of her. He puts his scheme into place and, as a result, Fryzer's comfortable life starts to collapse around him, particularly after a shareholder's meeting and the sale of shares by his bankrupt brother-in-law, Ivo Lord Redcastle, who is a director on the company's Board. And Adam Kindred, happily involved with Rita and Ly-on, decides to retain his identity of Primo Belem and to discard his former life as Adam Kindred and all his negative associations with it. |
The Boy from the Basement | null | null | Charlie is a twelve-year-old boy that has been forced to live in his basement all of his life. He has no idea what the outside world is like. Charlie has to scavenge for food when his psychotic father goes to sleep, and he must go to the bathroom in the yard. His father brainwashed him into thinking that he deserves the abuse. When Charlie accidentally goes into the outside world, he collapses and wakes up in a hospital. He is then sent to a foster home. With the help of his foster family and a psychologist, he tries to get over his psychological trauma and get used to the outside world. Charlie eventually gets used to the outside world, but still in fear of his nightmares that his dad will one day take him from his foster family. During his time in the outside world Charlie makes a new friend, Aaron, and his foster mother has two new children. He eventually overcomes his fear of his dad coming to get him. |
A Child Is Born | Lennart Nilsson | 1,965 | The book proceeds along two "tracks": one series of photographs and accompanying text depict the development of the fetus from conception through to birth; the other shows a woman and her partner as her pregnancy progresses. Early images show sperm proceeding toward an ovum; cell division, implantation, and the development of the embryo are then illustrated. The text accompanying the photographs of the woman supplies some antenatal care advice. |
How Could You Do This To Me, Mum? | null | 1,996 | Chelsea's parents don't want their daughter to have a birthday party, because it will be too expensive. Chelsea becomes jealous of her siblings Geneva and Warwick, who receive more money from their parents. Chelsea befriends Bex in the Stomping Ground nightclub. A few weeks later, their friendship is cemented after Fee's friend Eddie tries to assault Chelsea, and Bex comes to her aid. Barry Gee buys his own restaurant, which will be called Gee Zone. Jemma wants to be an actress, but her parents aren't happy when she neglects her schoolwork to attend acting and dancing lessons. Jemma ignores them, and trusts Ms. Olivia Ockley, the owner of the acting school, who praises her talent. However, Jemma is annoyed when Alexa Browning receives a lead role instead of her. Jemma also dates Rob, which causes friction between her and Chelsea, although they reconcile after Chelsea's encounter with Eddie. Jon wants to date Sumitha, but she is no longer interested. Jon is annoyed by his parents, who have little time for him. However, after Laura is injured in front of him at one of his mother's animal rights demonstrations, he realises that he likes her and asks her out. Laura's mother is pregnant, and her boyfriend Melvyn objects to Laura spending time at demos with her neighbour Daniel. Laura's brother is born prematurely, and at Laura's suggestion is named Charlie. Sumitha becomes a swot when she develops a crush on her new science teacher, Paul Sharpe. At the end of the term she tells him about her feelings, but learns that Paul is engaged to Mrs. McConnell. Sumitha is dismissive when Sandeep asks her to come back home with him, and feels bad after learning that he is being bullied by Kevin and Matthew. |
Does Anyone Ever Listen? | null | 1,998 | Sumitha meets Seb, who is in a band called Paper Turkey. Although they both like each other, they do not officially date. Sumitha dances to Paper Turkey's music in Stomping Ground, but her father sees it and forbids her to see Seb again. Sumitha lies to her father in order to go to a music festival where Paper Turkey are playing in a competition, but the band is drunk and do not win. Sumitha's father wants to arrange a marriage for her, and his friend Sajjed comes to visit, along with his son Asim and wife Chhobi. Asim objects to having an arranged marriage, which gains him Sumitha's admiration. Laura wants to break up with Jon because she has met Simon Stagg, but she does not know how to tell him. On New Year's Ever, she leaves her celebrations with Jon to see Simon, upsetting Jon who still loves her. Laura is hurt and upset to learn that Simon is gay, and she eventually gets back together with Jon. Chelsea has difficulty writing a sociology essay about unemployment, but after her mother is fired she writes an excellent essay and decides to study harder in the future. Bex returns to Leehampton, because her brother, Ricky, is a victim of violence at school. Chelsea helps him. Jemma is angry, because her dad wants to move to Scotland. She also argues with her father because he objects to her starring in a commercial. Jemma attends casting anyway, but walks out after she realises that the commercial suggests that only slim people are valuable. Jon's dad wants to move to Cornwall, because he is tired of his work. Jon argues with him, and then feel guilty after his father has a heart attack, even though it happened while his father was jogging. |
Oh. My. Gods. | null | null | Phoebe is a perfectly happy senior at high school and headed for USC with her best friends after graduation. Everything changes when her Mom comes back to California announcing she is getting married to a Greek man and they have plans to move there. They move to a secret island where she is accepted to an exclusive academy for the descendants of Greek gods, which is run by Phoebe's new stepfather. Phoebe doesn't really fit in, partly because she believes she's not of holy descent. Her new step-sister and others easily torment her, but Phoebe ignores them. At the school, she quickly befriends Nicole and Troy. Phoebe makes it onto her cross country team, running is her natural talent. Soon after, she gets swept up in controversies including her, Griffin, Nicole, Troy, Stella, and her dead dad. At the very end of the book, Phoebe finds out the biggest secret of her life: Phoebe is a descendant of Nike, the goddess of Victory. She then proceeds to talk to Griffin, who tells her he was destined to be with a descendant of Nike. They start a relationship together. *Phoebe Castro, the main character in the book. Her mom gets married, and she has to move to Serfopoula, causing her world to be turned upside down. She has trouble adjusting to her new life. She is a descendant from Nike. *Nicole Matios, one of Phoebe's three friends. Nicole is hardcore and isn't afraid of anything. *Troy Travatas, a friend of Phoebe. He is the descendant from Asclepius. *Griffin Blake, a boy from Phoebe's school that she likes. Later on, he is her boyfriend. He is a descendant from Ares and Hercules from his father's side. *Valerie Petrolas, a therapist and Phoebe's mom. Her relationship with Phoebe went downhill after they moved out to Serfopoula. *Stella Petrolas, Phoebe's stepsister, who tries to make Phoebe's life miserable. Stella is part of the mean and popular clique at school. Likewise, she is a descendant from Hera. *Damian Petrolas, Phoebe's stepfather (marries Phoebe's mother near the beginning of the book) and Stella's father. He is also the headmaster of the school that Phoebe and Stella attend. |
Andromeda Klein | Dr. Frank | null | Andromeda Klein is a teenage girl with many problems. She is unattractive, hard of hearing, her best friend and former magick partner Daisy recently died of cancer, "St. Steve" her boyfriend has gone missing, her mother is completely overbearing and her father is a paranoid conspiracist. She makes sense of the world through her complete immersion in the world of Magick and tarot, even taking on a job at her local library, which conveniently houses an impressive collection of esoteric books on just such subjects. When a list comes in, threatening to wipe the entire collection, Andromeda immediately enlists the help of all those she can find, and begins her battle with the "Friends of the Library". Meanwhile, Andromeda begins to receive a myriad of messages from Daisy, beyond the grave, and plies her younger brother with naked girl magazines (or "bagel worm agonies" as she mishears thanks to her partial deafness) in exchange for the remaining scraps of her dead best-friend's belongings. She then uses these as part of her witchcraft in an attempt to figure out just what Daisy is trying to tell her. Rosalie van Genuchten, and the rest of Andromeda's "afternoon tea" (alcohol and drugs) party friends, sick of her pining for St. Steve, attempt to set her up with various potential suitors who Andromeda dismisses on sight. However, in this process she picks up Byron, a short guy with unfortunate facial hair who nevertheless becomes a kind of apprentice to Andromeda's occultism, and confidant as new, exciting, but generally confusing text messages suddenly start coming in from St. Steve. The story gathers pace as Andromeda's tarot readings become increasingly literal and prophetic, sparking interest from fellow students, eager to know their futures, and more pressingly, who their boyfriends are cheating on them with. Andromeda's dreams start to feature a powerful new figure, called "The King of Sacremento", she begins to hear a voice in her head (that calls itself Huggy) and in a crescendo of increasingly elaborate and freaky spells, the mysteries of St. Steve, her tarot readings, and Daisy all become clear. |
The Secrets of Love | null | 2,005 | The Dashwood sisters, Ellie, Abby and Georgie go to London to visit their father. After spending The Day in Dungeons, they go to father’s new flat, where He lives with Pandora. They meet Blake Goodman – Pandora’s nephew. Georgie gets a birthday present and the girls come back to Brighton. Abby goes to the XS club, but she pretends that, she’ll be in the hospital, because her boyfriend had an accident. Her mother discovers it and Abby can’t go out with friends for a month. Few days later, Blake calls Ellie and tells her that Max is in the hospital. Ellie, Abby and their mother, Julia, go to London to visit Mr. Dashwood. Unfortunately, he dies and Abby blames Pandora of killing her dad. Pandora blames Julia, but ladies explain everything and talk about funeral details. Georgie comes back Home (she was at the zorbing session, which was present from Tom)and she’s really upset. Few days later Max’s lawyer comes to Holly House and tells Julia that, she and her daughters have to move out, because the house is Pandora’s property. Davina - Julia's mother, arrives to Holly House and tells her daughter that, they can move to Norfolk to her grandma's house. Abby discovers that, in Norfolk there are no clubs, discos and cinemas. She meets Chloe at school and they become friends. Chloe brings Abby for a concert of local group and they meet Nick Mayes, who falls in love with Abby. Unfortunately, Chloe has a crush on Nick and Abby can't go out with him. One day, Abby meets Hunter Meade-Holman - son of local politician. She falls in love with him and they become couple after few days. Nick doesn't want to look at Abby kissing Hunter and tells her about it. She doesn't care about him. Once, Hunter takes Abby out and offers to go to his house. He wants to make love with her, but Abby doesn't agree. Hunter breaks up with her and Abby comes back home on foot. Luckily, Nick finds her and she tells him about everything. Ellie's private life is complicated, either. Blake's got girlfriend - Lucy, who's grandma is ill and he can't break up with her. But he doesn't see any problems with kissing Ellie, who doesn't like his games. Ellie doesn't want to hear Blake's explanations, but Davina makes things worse - she wants Ellie to meet Lucy. Georgie has a new friend - Adam. He seems to have a crush on Georgie. They are working together on a party - they're waiters. Before starting their work, Adam talks with Georgie about sailing. He has strange voice and Georgie starts to think about his health. But when he kisses her, every thought about his illness is gone. Ellie works at the bar. She overheard Blake's conversation with Piers, his friend. She treats Blake very cool, when he comes to the bar and tells him to go to his girlfriend and dance with her. Hunter comes back for a party and he brings his new girlfriend with him. Abby sees it and tells Fiona that she's Hunter's girlfriend. She's very angry and she hits Fiona with her bag and runs away to the parking. She's got Nick's keys and she decides to get into the car and go home. Abby can't handle driving a car. Suddenly, she sees bright light and she becomes unconscious. Her family and Nick go to the hospital. Next day, Abby talks to Nick, who tells her about his feelings and kisses her. Abby talks to Chloe, who has a boyfriend now - Ryan. Abby goes out with Nick. She can't walk, so the boy brings a wheel chair for her. They go to the harbour and they see Georgie and Tom, who came to Norfolk to visit his friend. Georgie tells her sister that, she and Tom will be important for each other forever. Ellie talks to Blake, who came back from Hong Kong (he was going to go to Australia with Lucy, but he came back). He kisses her and tells Ellie that, he loves her. Then, he shows her portrait of Dashwood family: Max, Julia, Ellie, Abby and Georgie and offers her to come to Holly House. |
What a Week to Risk it All | null | 2,006 | Jade has a boyfriend - Flynn, whom she met when she was going to her grandma's place in Brighton. She acts like a nurse, when she is with him and she only cares about he won't get hurt. Flynn doesn't like it, because he's preparing for running-on-a-wheel-chair competition (he had an accident and he can't walk). Once, Jade and Flynn go to a party in a club, but Jez and Tamsin go there, too. Jez wants to attack Flynn with a knife, but he hit Tansy in her head with his handful. Flynn also got hurt, but not as much as Tansy. He didn't start in competition, but he plays in school theatre. He makes few steps and he is surpsised, when Jade doesn't treat him like he was made of glass. Tansy's got problems with Andy's mother. She knows that Mrs. Richards was unfaithful to Mr. Richards and she tells about everything Holly. Unfortunately, Holly repeats it when Andy is near her and he shouts at Tansy that, she can't keep a secret. Tansy is very upset. She goes to a party, but she doesn't come in, because Andy isn't there yet. Suddenly, she sees Jez and Tamsin. She can also see that Jade and Flynn are outside the club and Jez wants to hurt Flynn. Tansy got hurt by hitting her head. She goes to the hospital and she can't see by one eye. Andy comes to visit her and he apologises her. She doesn't tell him that, everything he heard is true. Andy's brother and sister will be baptismed. Their godfather will be Gordon - a man, who is father of the babies, but Mrs. Richards doesn't tell anybody about it. Godmother of the babies will be Tansy's mother, Clarity. Holly is going out with Ben. Her family moved out of burnt house. She has other problems - her boyfriend wants her to make love with him, but she doesn't agree. She doesn't talk to him for some days, but he explains her everything and promises to keep his hands next to him. Holly forgives him. Holly makes a scenography for a play in school theatre. She didn't get hurt, when Jez attacked Flynn. Cleo's mother is going to be a director in school play. For Cleo it is a bit embarrassing, because her mother thinks that, if she was a great actress, everyone will want her to work. Luckily, people, who organise it know Diana Greenway and are very pleased to work with her. Cleo goes out with Ross, but she doesn't care about him. She's angry when he runs away instead of helping Tansy, who got hurt. He apologises her and she forgives. When girl are planning holidays, she doesn't include Ross in her plans, because Holly, Jade and Tansy want to go for holiday with Cleo only and without their boyfriends. |
Summer of Secrets | null | 2,007 | Caitlin Morland wins an art scholarship to Mulberry Court school. There she meets Izzy Thorpe and Summer Tilney, whose parents are famous. She is a bit jealous of their fame and unlimited money. Caitlin cannot believe it when they say it is not fun having famous parents. Izzy Thorpe wants to visit Caitlin's home. After a lesson, when Caitlin was talking about Rubens' picture, Izzy visits her new friend. She is impressed with Caitlin's house and family, especially with her brother, Jamie. A few weeks before Izzy's birthday party, Izzy, Caitlin, Jamie and Tom go to a party in a club. Caitlin orders a juice. Summer talks to her, and then Bianca Joseph comes and takes Caitlin to chat with two boys. Caitlin tries to get there, but somebody hits her and the juice gets out of her glass. That's how she meets Ludo. He offers her something to drink and they talk about Summer. Tom comes and say he wants to take her to another club, but Caitlin declines. She tells Ludo that, Summer is in the bathroom. In the evening Caitlin draws a portrait of Ludo. Caitlin dresses herself as a Rose from "Titanic” for Izzy’s party. She waters herself during the party. Suddenly somebody knocks the door. They are journalists, who want to talk to Izzy’s dad, so the girl tell them that her parent are in Royal Pavillon. A few days later, Izzy goes to Caitlin’s place. Caitlin tells her parents that, she has been invited to spend two weeks in Casa Vernazza with Summer. Her parents agree and Jamie also joins them. During the flight to Italy, Caitlin reads some tabloids and Ludo notices it. He pretends to be interested in stars’ private life. He then reads a book and Caitlin starts to think that, he does not like her. Gabriella and Luigi come to take them from the airport. Ludo and Caitlin go with Gabriella. When she visits her friend, they talk about Summer. Soon they arrive at Casa Vernazza, Summer shows Caitlin her room and her own mother’s pictures. They go into town. Caitlin walks next to the church and she hears Summer’s voice. Her friend is talking with a man. She meets Ludo and his father. Ludo invites Caitlin to ride his yacht with him later on. During supper they discuss this and as a result Freddie, Izzy, Jamie, Gabriella and Summer go with them too. During the trip everybody goes swimming except Jamie. Summer and Caitlin abruptly set off to the local gallery. They pretend to be students, who are working on an article about Elena Cumani-Tilney’s pictures. But when Lorenzo brings one of them, Summer cries and he knows that, she is Elena’s daughter. Ludo calls Caitlin and tells her to come back. Summer will not talk to her because she thinks that Caitlin was after her, when they went to town. Luckily this does not lead to an argument. Caitlin decides to help Summer discover how her mother died. After some time she says that Sir Magnus and Gabriella must have murdered her mother, but she will not talk about it to Summer. In Elena’s paintings, Caitlin finds a pretty one called Abbey, July 2004. She finds it in the Internet and discovers that, it is a mental hospital. All of a sudden Summer runs away from home. Whilst everybody is searching for her somebody calls from hospital to inform that Freddie and Izzy had had an accident. Alex di Matteo comes to the Tilneys’ house. He talks to her about his trip to Milan with his grandma, but she had thought that he had another girlfriend. Summer calls Caitlin and everything is explained. Ludo takes her for a walk and tells that, he in fact loves her. A few days later they open a gallery of Elena Cumani-Tilney’s paintings in a house next to the Tilneys’. In the evening, they go for a ride on Ludo’s yacht. First, Ludo wants to know if Caitlin is going to send an article about his mother’s death to tabloid. She says that she is not but, that she has some titles in her head. Ludo tells Caitlin that he fell in love with her when he saw how seriously she treats those articles. However, Caitlin doesn't believe him in the beginning so he kisses her and all ends well. |
The German lesson | Siegfried Lenz | 1,968 | Siggi Jepsen (the first-person narrator), an inmate of a juvenile detention center, is forced to write an essay themed The Joy of Duty. In the essay, Siggi Jepsen describes his youth in Nazi Germany where his father, the "most northerly police officer in Germany" does his duty, even as his task is to debar an old childhood friend, the painter Max Nansen, from his profession. Siggi feels compelled by Nansen's paintings, "the green faces, the Mongol eyes, these deformed bodies ... " and, without the knowledge of his father, manages to hide some of the confiscated paintings. Following the end of WWII, Jepsen is interned for a short time and later reinstalled into his position. When his father then nonetheless continues to carry out his former orders, Siggi brings paintings that he believes to be in danger to safety. His father discovers his doings and dutifully turns him in for art theft. While forced to write the essay on "The Joy of Duty" during his term in the juvenile detention center in Hamburg, the memories of his childhood come to the surface and he goes far beyond the "duty" of writing his essay by filling several notebooks, the makings of this novel. * Siggi Jepsen * Jens Ole Jepsen : Siggi's father, a police officer * Max Nansen : a painter, pursued by the Nazis, whom Lenz based on the expressionist painter Emil Nolde * Gudrun Jepsen : Siggi's mother * Klaas : Siggi's brother * Hilke : Siggi's sister |
A Morbid Taste for Bones | Edith Pargeter | 1,977 | The book is set in 1137. Brother Cadfael is introduced, working in the herb gardens of Shrewsbury Abbey. A Welshman who has been on Crusade before joining the Order of Saint Benedict in middle life, he has far more worldly experience than most of his brother monks. He has two young monks to assist him in his work; John, who is practical and down-to-earth, and Columbanus, who is ambitious and sanctimonious. One morning, Columbanus is taken ill with what some take to be the "falling sickness" (epilepsy) but which Cadfael reckons to be a hysterical fit. Brother Jerome, clerk to the ambitious Prior Robert, prays over Columbanus during the night and announces the next day that a young woman appeared to him and told him to take Columbanus to St Winefride's Well in North Wales. When they return, Columbanus is recovered. He in turn says that Saint Winefride appeared to him and stated that her grave at Gwytherin in North Wales had long been neglected, and she desired to be interred somewhere more accessible to pilgrims. Neither Cadfael nor John believe the tales. Prior Robert is known to have been searching for some time for a suitable saint's relics to grace Shrewsbury Abbey. Robert, the lazy Sub-Prior Richard, Jerome and Columbanus prepare to journey to Wales to retrieve Winefride's remains. Cadfael induces Abbot Heribert to send him with them, as a fluent Welsh-speaker will be required, and John, to do the menial work. The Bishop of Bangor and Owain Gwynedd, prince of Gwynedd, give their assent, and the monks reach Gwytherin, a community stretching for several miles along the Cledwen River. The local priest, Father Huw, is hospitable, but objects to Winefride's remains being removed without first calling an assembly of the free men of the parish. When it is held the next morning, Rhisiart, the most influential landowner in the community, opposes the Saint's removal. Prior Robert makes a misguided attempt to bribe him. Rhisiart storms off, announcing that he is implacably opposed to Robert. The assembly breaks up, with every man agreeing with Rhisiart. Robert and Jerome take the view that Rhisiart is committing blasphemy, but Father Huw persuades Robert to appeal to Rhisiart for another meeting. At the house of Cai, Rhisiart's ploughman, John talks to Annest, the niece of Bened the blacksmith, and they quickly fall in love despite the difference in language. Rhisiart meanwhile does not change his views, but agrees to meet Prior Robert at Huw's house at noon the next day. The next morning Robert tells John to make himself useful to the servants and sends Jerome and Columbanus to pray at Winefride's chapel while he, Richard, Cadfael and Huw wait for Rhisiart. Rhisiart does not appear. When he has been missing for some hours, a search is mounted, and he is found dead in some dense woods, apparently shot from in front with a bow and arrow. The arrow bears the mark of Engelard, an Englishman who has fled into Wales to avoid punishment for poaching, and who is in love with Rhisiart's daughter Sioned. When Engelard appears, many locals insist that he had motive to kill Rhisiart. At Robert's insistence, they prepare to take him into custody. On the spur of the moment, Engelard flees, and Brother John impedes the only local man close enough to stop him. Robert furiously orders John to be held for breaking the law of Gwynedd and his own vow of obedience. Since he is to be held at Rhisiart's house, where he will have contact with Annest, John meekly complies. Cadfael meanwhile realises that Engelard's arrow did not kill Rhisiart. It had rained for an hour about noon. Rhisiart's back, on which he lay, is damp, while his front is dry. Rhisiart was stabbed from behind, by a dagger which penetrated through his body, and fell face down. Some time later, after it rained, someone turned him over and pushed the arrow into the wound from the front. For the moment, Cadfael can only speculate why anyone would do this. Although the monks from Shrewsbury all appear to have alibis for the time of Rhisiart's death, Columbanus confesses the next morning to sleeping rather than praying all the previous day, making Jerome a suspect. Father Huw tells Robert that his flock have taken Rhisiart's death as an omen and no longer oppose Winefride's removal. Robert declares that he will exhume the remains only after three nights' vigil and prayer. Cadfael takes advantage of the superstition that a corpse will bleed afresh if touched by the murderer (though he does not believe it himself, having seen men who died in battle being handled by those who killed them). At his suggestion, Sioned asks that after each night's prayer, the two who maintained the vigil place their hand upon Rhisiart's heart in token of forgiveness. On the first morning, Jerome appears to hesitate, but eventually does as Sioned asks. The next night, Robert excuses himself from the vigil on the pretext of relating the recent events to Prince Owain's bailiff. On the third night, Cadfael and Columbanus share the vigil, but Columbanus once again has a fit of religious ecstasy and is carried off unconscious in the morning. He recovers after Mass, and relates that Winefride appeared once again to him and said that Rhisiart should be buried in her grave when she is removed. They begin digging out Winefride's grave. Cadfael finds the body several feet down, and the monks carefully place it in the coffin brought from Shrewsbury. Prior Robert places wax seals on the coffin to prevent anyone from disturbing the contents. As they prepare to bury Rhisiart in her place, Sioned asks Peredur, another young man who has been in love with her, to place a jewelled cross on the body. Peredur refuses, terrified, and claims that Rhisiart cannot accuse him. He confesses that he found Rhisiart dead and pushed one of Engelard's arrows into the wound, thinking that Engelard would flee into England and thus remove himself as rival for Sioned's hand. Shocked by these revelations, Peredur's mother Branwen becomes hysterical. Cadfael had previously prepared a flask of a tranquilising syrup derived from poppies, in case of further hysterical fits by Columbanus. He retrieves it from Columbanus's belongings and finds most of it is gone, though enough remains to calm Branwen. He then recalls that on the day of Rhisiart's murder, Columbanus confessed to sleeping while at vigil, but only Jerome drank some of the wine provided for sustenance. Had it been laced with the syrup, Jerome would almost certainly have slept through the vigil, but would have been ashamed to admit it. Cadfael is distracted from this train of thought by the news that the Prince's bailiff is about to take John into custody. When the bailiff arrives at Sioned's dwelling, he is met by Cai, who is wearing a bloodstained bandage and says that John broke free after striking him with a board. Though Robert is displeased, the bailiff, Cai, Bened and Annest all seem rather complacent over the escape. On the last night before the monks depart, Columbanus, who Sioned and Cadfael reckon is taking the glory of the translation of the saint for himself, offers to mount another solitary vigil. As he believes himself to be unobserved, he composes himself to sleep. He is awakened by the vision of a young woman demanding to know why he murdered Rhisiart, her champion. Unnerved, Columbanus confesses and begs forgiveness from the saint, saying that the deed was for her glory. As she calls him a liar, Columbanus realises that the "saint" is actually Sioned, and slashes at her with a knife, inflicting only a graze, before fleeing. Cadfael and Engelard tackle him outside the chapel. Seeing Sioned bleeding from her wounds, an enraged Engelard hurls Columbanus to the ground hard enough to break his neck. Faced with this unexpected development, Cadfael recalls Sioned's inspired words about Rhisiart being her champion. He, Engelard, and Sioned quickly undress Columbanus, open St. Winifrede's coffin, replace the remains of the saint in her grave above Rhisiart's body, and place Columbanus's naked body in the coffin. Cadfael uses his knowledge of seals (and, more importantly, how to inconspicuously break them) to give the appearance that the coffin remained undisturbed. The three then prepare the chapel for discovery in the morning. The next morning, Columbanus's shirt and habit are found empty on the floor of the chapel. Hawthorn petals are scattered around them. Though some wonder whether Columbanus has gone mad and is wandering naked, Robert proclaims that Columbanus's prayers to be taken from the world into a state of grace have been answered. The villagers help load the saint's suspiciously heavy coffin aboard a cart without any outward sign that anything is wrong, yet Cadfael suspects that every one of them knows what happened during the night. As they leave Gwytherin, John can be seen (by Cadfael) bidding them farewell. Two years later, Bened, the smith from Gwytherin, calls at Shrewsbury Abbey while on a pilgrimage to Walsingham. He tells Cadfael that John and Annest are married, and John will become the smith after Bened. Sioned and Engelard are also married, and have christened their first child Cadfael. To Robert's chagrin, he relates that what Robert fondly imagines to be Saint Winefride's former resting place in Gwytherin is the scene of many pilgrimages and miraculous cures, when the ornate tomb in the Abbey is treated with indifference by pilgrims and apparently the saint herself. Cadfael is left musing that the saint is unlikely to object to sharing a grave with Rhisiart. |
The Storyteller | Mario Vargas Llosa | 1,987 | The story is set in Peru of the 1950. Through the alternation of two narrators, the novel presents a story of Saul Zuratas, a man who decides to leave his past identity behind and go native in one of the indigenous tribes of Peru. Unlike the ethnographers and linguists who explore the aborigine tribes for professional or rational reasons, Saul’s motive is intimate and emotional. But his noble intention becomes questionable when the reader gradually finds out that the hero could not leave behind the western dominant discourses on which his entire life had been built. This novel deals with the problem that not only persists in Peru, but also in many other counties of Latin America: the coexistence of the modern society which is prepared to participate in the cultural, economical and political life of the Global World, and of the indigenous population, which is viewed by modern societies as archaic and primitive (Mario). The plot develops an extended argument of two sides of what to do with Peru's native Amazonian populations. One side argues that tribes should be left alone to live as they have for millennia, leaving them full access and use of their ancient lands. The other side posits that such ancient ways cannot survive the exploitation of economic interests. In order to save them, natives must be protected by modern intervention of missionaries and government agencies. Through the book, each character seeks ways to protect these groups. Odd chapters are narrated by Mario Vargas Llosa, both a character and the author of the text. These chapters are set in San Marcos University, the radio station where Mario is employed, and several pubs around the city. Even number chapters are narrated by Saúl Zaratas as the Storyteller for the Machiguenga and are devoted entirely to telling the history of the tribe and its methods of survival. Those chapters are set throughout the Amazon as the Storyteller travels from one group to another. The two characters meet only in the odd chapters from time to time, debating politics, university life, and occasionally the rights of the native tribes to either exist as they have or be saved by modernization. In the end, Mario (the character) creates a commentary for public television to shed light on the plight of the Machiguenga, with the hope of convincing himself that the tribe is in better shape for the interventions of modern civilization imposed upon them. Saúl, for his part, fully integrates into the tribe, donning his western ways and incorporating himself fulling as a historian and communication link for the disparate members across the Amazon. |
Meeting at the Milestone | Sigurd Hoel | null | The novel starts with a short and mysterious prologue, Frontkjemperen (The eastern front volunteer), allegedly written in 1947. The narrator talks about "I", "he" who got eight years, "his father" who committed suicide, and "her" who "I" have not spoken with since 1945. Even though this is the fate of strangers, "I" will organise some personal notes. The first part of the book is written immediately after this, still in 1947. It talks about the time before 1943 when "I" wrote the second part of the book. He talks about the house that he has bought after lengthy negotiations with the master builder. He lost his family early during the occupation, and he was also imprisoned for a couple of weeks. By the resistance he was called "The spotless one", a nickname he quite appreciated. The leader of the resistance decided that his house was suitable for hiding people who needed to go into hiding. One day in 1943 a man named Indregaard came to the house. The spotless one knew of him already. Indregaard was depressed and needed to talk about his problems with The spotless one. The conversation soon got to a common acquaintance, Hans Berg, who was a Nazi. Indregaard thought that because of what happened in their youth he was responsible for Hans Berg's Nazism. The spotless one now starts writing about Hans Berg in order to find out why some people turn to Nazism. This part, which is written in 1943, starts with an analysis of Hans Berg's childhood and youth. The spotless one fails at his analysis. He then tries to analyse others of his fellow students who became Nazis, amongst them Carl Heidenreich, simply and superficially. Again he fails. It becomes evident that it is his own past he wants to analyse. He describes his childhood, his father, his time as a student in Kristiania, and his first erotic experiences. After a couple of brief relationships he meets "Kari". He stops mid-sentence as he reveals that "Kari" fell pregnant. The third part is written in Sweden in 1944. The spotless one had to flee after an assignment in the southern part of the country. He was assigned with tracing an informant in a small town. The informant turned out to be his own son by "Kari". She was married to Carl Heidenreich, and her real name was Maria. The spotless one let himself get captured by the Nazis, and was interrogated by Heidenreich. After the torture, or redemption, he experienced a 'vision' where he saw it all. He was rescued by Kari/Maria. He realised during the escape that he was responsible for the downfall of his family. The final part of the novel is written in 1947. The spotless one visited Maria when he came back to Norway. He was told that Carl Heidenreich had committed suicide, and that his son, Karsten, had been arrested. Finally he describes fragments of his 'vision'. no:Møte ved milepelen |
High Vacuum | Robert Wade | null | The first manned moon ship, Alpha, runs out of fuel just before landing in the Mare Imbrium, and crashes, killing one of the four-man crew and marooning the rest. The novel follows the castaways as they struggle to survive and return to Earth. |
Freddy and Simon the Dictator | Walter R. Brooks | null | The local rabbits have been much help to the Bean animals, so it is a surprise that some are vandalizing and stealing. Confronted, instead of apologizing, a rabbit criticizes Mrs. Bean, then gives ridiculous evidence that her husband was eaten by the Beans. Freddy and Jinx the cat investigate, discovering that the Grimby house in the woods next to the farm is used for political meetings. The speaker, inside a mechanical man that amplifies and distorts his voice, encourages the animal assembly to be "free" of humans. Freddy guesses their foe Mr. Garble is behind it. The A.B.I. (Animal Bureau of Investigation) is alerted to watch. Freddy’s friend Mr. Camphor is asked to run for governor. This does not suit him ("I could sound like a fine governor, if I didn’t have to do any governing." p. 32). Camphor asks Freddy to visit the political meeting at his mansion, to say bad things about Camphor’s suitability. The pig, in his disguise as Dr. Hopper, invents faults, including that Camphor giggles in church and during speeches. But the political committee manages to see the bright side of these faults. Money was stolen, and Mr. Bean’s handkerchief found at the crime scene. Since Mr. Bean’s laundry was stolen by rabbits, Freddy suspects a plot to organize animals against humans, telling lies that might be eventually believed. Miss Anguish, Camphor’s sister, is one of the guests. Her thinking is spacey, but it may be an act. She states that Freddy is a Hollywood film director. (So now Freddy is dealing with three odd sorts of thinking at once.) Freddy tries convincing the committee again that Camphor is an unsuitable candidate: He proposes that all animals be given the right to vote! While the committee is deliberating, Freddy investigates the money theft. Before he can collect evidence, Mr. Bean is jailed. Camphor joins the local Indian tribe to hide. Jinx discovers Simon the rat has returned, and with Mr. Garble is encouraging all animals to revolt and take control of farms from humans. To infiltrate the group, Jinx determines to pretend he has joined the revolution. Freddy and Camphor’s butler, Bannister, are unable to convince Camphor to return; he has disguised himself as an Indian. The A.B.I. discovers the hideout where Garble is managing the revolution. They capture him, and smash the mechanical man used to make speeches. It is too late to stop the revolution, however. Farms are taken over, including the Bean farm, which is then run by Jinx. Since the Bean animals do not know Jinx is undercover, he takes considerable abuse. To strike at the revolution, Freddy gets the cooperation of the captured Garble by convincing him that the Indians will burn him at the stake. Then Freddy turns to Simon, and for a while follows Jinx’s lead — only to trick Simon into sitting a cage disguised as a throne. With Simon out of the way, Camphor decides to appeal directly to the animals of the revolution, promising them the right to vote — which will make them the equals of people. This strikes a chord, and the revolution falters. Employing the aid of the dogs, who have generally stay loyal to their human masters, the farms are gradually recovered. Garble escapes. He captures Freddy, Miss Anguish and Jinx, holding them for ransom. Miss Anguish tries to confuse their captors, but finally in desperation they set a fire to attract attention. Garble is recaptured and sent to prison. Simon and his criminal family are packed in a crate that is indefinitely shipped from place to place. The revolution fails. With the animal vote, Camphor becomes governor. |
Septimus Heap: The Magykal Papers | Angie Sage | 2,009 | The book is divided into four sections. The first section, "Papers from the Castle," opens with a bit of history. It tells about the background of how The Castle developed from a little village and how the Queen came to stay there and the arrival of the ExtraOrdinary Wizard. This is followed by Rupert Gringe's Around-the-Castle Boat Tour programme. Other tours are represented, such as the "Ask Sirius Walking Tour of the Castle and the Ramblings" and Silas Heap's ink-splotched "A Ramble through the Ramblings Walking Tour." After a restaurant guide, the biographies of the main characters start. Never before known facts facts about Sarah and Silas Heap, Jenna, Mr. and Mrs. Gringe, Marcia Overstrand, ghost Alther Mella, spy Linda Lane and the main protagonist Septimus Heap. One can delve even deeper into these personalities by way of the journals, letters, appointment diaries, and family trees. The second part, "Papers from the Wizard Tower" includes a brief history of the construction of the Wizard Tower and rules and regulations one should consider while visiting the Tower. It also includes Septimus' homeworks and its corrections by Marcia and a pamphlet by Alther Mella, on assisting recently turned ghosts in the afterlife. The third part, entitled "Papers from The Palace" describes the Palace as a whole and includes Jenna's private journals and a brief history of some notable queens. The last part talks about the Message Rat service and other locations of the Castle. |
Alinda of the Loch | null | null | Alinda experiences a similar curse to the one cast on her mother; However, in this tale, the Shadow Fairy curses Alinda with a 500 year deep sleep. On her eighteenth birthday, Alinda falls asleep, and knowing that they will not be around when she is awakened, the King and Queen find a secure resting place for her and employ a young dragon named Nessie to keep watch of her for those five hundred years. The story takes an unsuspecting turn when Alinda wakes up staring out of her glass topped bed to a young man named Grant. From this point, Alinda is introduced to an unfamiliar modern world with airplanes, cars, rock music and very different clothing styles. |
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense | Patrick Robinson | 2,009 | The book is highly critical of Richard Fuld, Henry Paulson, and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, a 1999 act of Congress signed by former United States President Bill Clinton that repealed portions of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. The book contains an account of how McDonald, after attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst, selling pork chops, and self-teaching himself the material required to pass the General Securities Representative Exam, went on to develop the website ConvertBond.com, which was later purchased by Morgan Stanley. The author's stated expertise, in the convertible bond market, was what allowed him to create the website ConvertBond.com during the dot-com bubble, and successfully sell it to Morgan Stanley before the Internet bubble burst. It was while he was working at Morgan Stanley that McDonald was offered a job as vice-president at Lehman Brothers. The book characterizes Richard Fuld as being out of touch, smug, and a ruthless CEO with a short temper and a penchant for rage. The book sarcastically refers to Fuld as "his majesty," "god-like," and a "spiritual leader." McDonald believes that the United States government should have saved Lehman Brothers, and that Dick Fuld falsely believed that the United States government would save the company after having a meeting with Henry Paulson in the spring of 2008, which led him to engage in unnecessarily risky behavior and reject an offer of $18 per share from the Korea Development Bank as late as August 2008. |
Wolf: The Journey Home | 'Asta Bowen | 1,997 | Marta, a black gray wolf, is alpha female in a small pack in Pleasant Valley, Montana, that consists of her mate, Calef, their three pups Rann, Sula, and Annie, and a seven-year-old wolf named Oldtooth. One morning Calef is killed by poachers, leaving Marta and Oldtooth to try to feed and raise the pups on their own. Though an experienced hunter, Oldtooth is unable to bring down large game as he lost most of his teeth chewing a steel leg trap off his leg years ago. Once the cubs are old enough to be left alone for short periods of time, Marta takes over the bulk of the hunting. Though it is difficult, the two adults successfully keep all three cubs alive and begin weaning them and teaching them the ways of the wolf. In the summer, traps begin appearing in the area as human populations increase. Annie and Sula are caught and are taken away by humans, but reappear a few days later, locked in cages. Marta tries to free her pups but is unsuccessful; however humans come regularly to keep them fed and ensure they have water. Oldtooth is later captured, while Marta is tranquilized from a helicopter. Rann escapes and is not seen again. The wolves are kept in a human facility for a couple of months to be examined, and a wound on Oldtooth's paw is treated. In early winter, the wolves are sedated again and awaken to find themselves in a strange high place with radio collars around their necks. Still groggy from the tranquilizer, the strangeness of the events and the smell of grizzly bear in the area triggers Marta's flight instincts and she runs blindly downward, leaving Oldtooth and the cubs behind. When Oldtooth awakens, he quietly abandons Annie and Sula, following Marta's trail, but at a much slower pace. Marta continues running in the direction she believes will lead back to Pleasant Valley, swimming across Middle Fork River, crossing the nearby highway and railroad tracks, and running through various woodlands in between. Pausing only to drink water and tend her paws, she crosses Pyramid Peak and swims across the Hungry Horse Reservoir, before a week without food and exhaustion cause her to collapse on the shore. After resting, she continues her run, though hunger now spurs her to pause to hunt when she can but she eventually collapses by Flathead Lake, where she remains unconscious for days. Meanwhile, unskilled at hunting and without the adults to teach them how to survive, Annie and Sula slowly starve to death. Oldtooth reaches Middle Fork Valley, where illness and his lame foot drive him to hunt local livestock. He is shot and killed by a human. When Marta recovers, her instincts to return home are dulled and she begins traveling more slowly. She makes her way through Swan Valley to cross the Swan Range and Mission Mountains. As winter settles in, she makes a winter home around Lindbergh Lake, where hunting is good and humans few. Near the end of winter, she meets another lone wolf, Greatfoot, a large male. Initially they maintain their distance from one another, until Greatfoot hunts the elk herd in Marta's range, specifically the aging leader that Marta favored and refused to hunt herself. She stops the other wolf's hunt, and after a brief skirmish they forget the elk and become friendly. They form a pack of two and leave the area, heading south. After mating, their travels become more urgent to find a home to raise young. They settle in Ninemile Valley, a large forested region that while inhabited by humans, has few roads and homes. Several weeks after they make their den, Marta gives birth to seven pups, though one dies shortly after birth. As spring arrives, the pups grow well under their parents care and begin making their first explorations outside of the den. In early summer, Marta leaves the den to hunt and is killed by a poacher. Greatfoot is left as the sole provider for the pups. Though they were not fully weaned, they soon learn to eat the meat their father provides and he slowly begins teaching them how to avoid humans and how to survive. The only human the pack ignores is a human scent they frequently find on their trails, as no human ever appears with it, only the occasional sound of a truck nearby. Near the end of summer, Greatfoot is run over and killed while crossing a freeway during a hunt. The pups begin hearing a strange wolf howl, but when they track it they find a fresh kill and the familiar human scent. New kills appear every few days as the young wolves grow larger and stronger. One night when they hear the unusual howl, they are closer than usual to it and reach the kill in time to meet their benefactor, a human male. The pack stares at the man, before disappearing back into the forest, ignoring his howl. As he goes to leave, however, the six return to the edge of the clearing and howl. |
Little King Matty...and the Desert Island | Janusz Korczak | null | Little King Matty...and the Desert Island is a story about freedom, democracy, politics, travel, corruption, tyranny and reform. Matty becomes king after his father’s death: he then must learn about “etiquette” – what kings can do and what they cannot – he has to learn to interpret the lies of his adult political advisors – and diplomacy “all about telling fibs”. His efforts to bring about reform take him to war with three neighboring kingdoms who try to partition his country. He succeeds in vanquishing them and wins by treaty. However, because his country is bankrupt, the other European countries refuse to provide him with aid to build ships so that he can make his kingdom economically sustainable. So, he goes to the land of the cannibals and witch-doctors where the child king succeeds in making a treaty that saves his kingdom, much to the annoyance of some of his political advisors and two of his vanquished neighbours. The story is romantic; the daughter of the African king, Klu Klu, falls in love with Matty and smuggles herself into his kingdom. She kills a rabid wolf with her dagger, saving Matty’s life and the people of the capital and becomes the People’s Heroine. She becomes a role model for all women in Europe and Africa. She learns faster, hunts better and is Matty’s best warrior. Matty’s reforms anger his adult enemies, who secretly encourage anarchy and invade his country again. His African warriors and Princess bravely fight alongside Matty, but he is betrayed by some of his cowardly adult citizens. His three enemies partition his country and, in the manner of Napoleon, order the child King to be banished to a deserted Island. However, before this is implemented, Matty escapes from gaol and is rescued by his African Princess and her father who renegotiates Matty’s sentence. The European kings cheat and Klu Klu’s father declares war on the whites. During a few paragraphs, there are references to Europe’s colonial atrocities in Africa and how Europe relies on Africa for goods like chocolate. Matty chooses to go into exile to protect his country. However, he escapes when a swimming postal rat from Klu Klu reaches him with urgent messages; he is kidnapped by his worst and strongest enemy and hides in a maximum security prison where he is cared for and taught by the worst criminals. Later he hides his identity and goes to a school were peer pressure prevents him from doing better, until he loses his temper. He, the victim, nearly becomes a bully. It is here that he learns that this worst enemy wants to go to war against his kingdom for a third time. As anger turns to bitterness, self-analysis saves Matty; Matty uses and learns humour to prevent him becoming maudlin. Thus, he eventually regains his self-confidence and rescues his kingdom. The book ends with Matty first becoming disillusioned, then dying. |
Report to the Principal's Office | Jerry Spinelli | 1,991 | Hillary Kain and Sunny Wyler are best friends. They live across the street from each other. But when Hillary and Sunny find out they are going to separate middle schools, they are thrown into depression. Sunny vows to not change her shirt, not wash her hair, and never even smile until she gets into the same school as Hillary. School begins at brand-new Plumstead Middle School, and there are four sixth graders who, somehow, meet. Eddie Mott is a child who tries to fit in, yet still has a hard time (e.g. he gets beaten up on the morning bus). Salem Brownmiller, a girl who loves to write stories, enjoys this because she is writing a story about a sixth-grade boy's first day at middle school - and Eddie is the perfect fit. Dennis "Pickles" Johnson, a famous child inventor, somehow finds his way with the other three children. And on the first day, they are all sent to the principal's, Charles T. Brimlow, |
Thirteen Women Strong | null | null | This book revolves around Northern Kentucky University's women's basketball team and their 2006-2007 season. In this book, Dr. Wallace reveals the internal and external struggles that these young ladies had to face as student athletes. This book delivers the success and hardships endured by young women on a journey towards more than just a national championship. Most would think this book is only about basketball, but this story conveys how Nancy Winstel facilitated the growth of players into professional women. She shows her players how basketball can not only teach you how to set goals but to achieve them, both on and off the court. These players balanced class, winning and losing games, injuries, their personal lives, Coach Winstel's attitude as well as opposing teams. The previous year they were knocked out of the playoffs by a team they knew they could beat, and decided a stand had to be made. This book is about their stand to win. |
Timeliner | Robert Wade | null | Timeliner is a time travel story. A scientist working with "dimensional quadrature" is flung forward in time, to a period where his consciousness ousts that of another man. When that man dies, the protagonist leaps forward again, and so on. In each case, the personality he replaces belongs to a person who is close to a woman who resembles his wife. |
Forge of Fury | Richard Baker | null | The Forge of Fury is a dungeon crawl, a site-based adventure describing the stronghold of Khundrukar. The great dwarven smith Durgeddin the Black founded the secret stronghold within a great underground cavern system two hundred years ago when he and his clan were driven from his home by a horde of orcs and trolls. The orcs discovered the location of Khundrukar a century ago when they captured one of Durgeddin's clansmen, and raised a great army that stormed the stronghold and slew the dwarves, allowing its five levels to fall into ruins as goblins, orcs, and other monsters used the place as a base. Legends tell of the extraordinary blades Durgeddin forged in anger, enticing the player characters to come to the ruins of Khundrukar in search of these weapons. |
Dead in the Family | Charlaine Harris | 2,010 | When the novel begins, Sookie Stackhouse is still recovering physically and emotionally from the torture she received at the hands of demented fairies Lochlan and Neave in the previous book (Dead and Gone). She has finally settled into a relationship with the Viking vampire Eric, and her errant brother Jason seems to have his life in order, too, with a solid new girlfriend, Michele. But all the other people in Sookie’s life—Eric himself, her former lover Bill, her friend and boss Sam—are having family problems. Eric’s maker, Appius Livius Ocella, shows up with Eric’s ‘brother’ in tow—he is Alexei Romanov, only son of the last Czar of Russia, who as an adolescent witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, including the slaughter of his entire family. He developed emotional problems as a result. Appius has sought Eric out as a last resort, to see if Eric can help restore Alexei to sanity. Meanwhile, Bill is still suffering from the silver poisoning he got via the teeth of Neave when he rescued Sookie from her torturers. He is not getting better, and may only be able to be cured by the blood of a vampire made by Bill's maker, the dead Lorena, but Bill refuses to ask his sibling for help. The furor raised by the coming out of the two-natured continues, as Calvin Norris reveals himself to his co-workers and Sam's family deals with the news of having the two-natured in the family. Certain forces are agitating for a were registration system, and the weres suspect that they are under surveillance by the government. Sookie begins to recover from her torture at the hands of Lochlan and Neave, but still has post-traumatic stress and anxiety. She wants to kill Victor because she realizes he is a major threat to Eric, Pam, and Bill, wanting them dead. But Sookie struggles with the idea of killing Victor in cold blood, rather than in the heat of battle or in self-defense. Victor sends assassins to kill Sookie, Pam, and Bill, without success. Sookie's cousin Claude comes to live with her, claiming he suffers without the company of other fairies (his triplets, Claudine and Claudette, are now deceased). Sookie's mad half-fae uncle, Dermot, has been wandering the property for reasons unknown, as has another unidentified fairy. Sookie seeks out Bill's "sibling", Judith Vardamon, to ask for her help. She learns that Judith was made vampire by Lorena in an attempt to placate a sullen Bill, her reasoning being that having a companion who so resembled Bill's late wife would please him. However, Bill avoids contact with Judith, believing that she blames him for her vampiric state. Judith won't contact Bill because she fears and hates Lorena. Sookie contacts Judith for the sake of Bill's health. Upon learning of Lorena's death, Judith is overjoyed and happily anticipatory of her visit with Bill. Her blood serves to heal him, and the two seem to build a rapport quickly. Sookie is called upon to babysit her cousin Hadley's young son, Hunter, who is also telepathic. She helps him with the social nuances of being telepathic. Sookie attends a trial by the Shreveport pack, to learn why the body of Basim, a new were, was found buried on her property. She learns that Alcide's second is the bloodthirsty Jannalynn, who is dating Sam Merlotte. Sookie struggles to prevent the pack from killing any of their own. Ultimately, she learns that Colman, father of the baby Claudine was carrying, is seeking revenge on Sookie for the part he perceives she played in Claudine's death. He was going to kill her, but after seeing her mothering Hunter, he can't bear to kill her, and instead wants her to be arrested. Meanwhile, Alexei has been carelessly draining people and refusing to be controlled by Appius, and Eric struggles to control him. Ultimately, Alexei attacks and almost kills Pam and Eric, and kills Bobby Burnham (Eric's "day man"), and Felicia. The stories converge at Sookie's house, where Eric kills Alexei, Colman kills Appius Livius while attempting to kill Sookie, and Eric kills Colman. Sookie and Claude free Dermot from the spell that had made him mad. |
Mystery | null | null | In the 1960s, a young boy named Tom Pasmore views an article about a woman named Jeanine Thielman who was murdered and then dumped in a lake. In June not long afterwards, Tom takes a milk cart from his home to a street called Calle Burleigh. There he hears the crying of an animal and, searching for this animal, finds a teenaged boy slightly older than him named Jerry and his older sister Robyn. When Tom says that he wants to go home, Jerry attacks him. Tom escapes, but is followed by two boys, Robbie and Nappy, who threaten him with knives. They chase Tom into the street, where he is hit by a car and severely injured. He spends the summer at Shady Mount Hospital in Mill Walk where he lives. He is visited by the following people: Gloria and Victor Pasmore, his parents; Hattie Bascombe and Nancy Vetiver, two nurses; Dr. Bonaventure Milton, the head doctor; Sarah Spence, a classmate; Lamont von Heilich, an elderly neighbor; He leaves the hospital at the end of the summer, fully healed. For one year he stays home and reads while he recovers. He attends junior high and proves to be a rather awkward student. He becomes rather obsessed with recent homicides in Mill Walk and makes a scrapbook profiling each one. Gloria Pasmore finds the scrapbook and is disturbed. She asks Tom's favorite teacher, Dennis Handley, to speak to Tom on the subject of the notebook. Dennis takes Tom driving, and Tom, now seventeen years old, asks about the death of a woman named Marita, in full awareness of Dennis' motives for driving him around. Under Tom's orders, Dennis stumbles upon the car in which Marita was shot and killed. Tom sees Lamont von Heilich at the scene and then leaves. Tom writes a letter to Captain Fulton Bishop, a detective involved in the case of Marita's murder. Victor Pasmore warns Tom to stay away from Lamont, though Tom does not and visits Lamont's house that same day, mailing the letter on the way there. Lamont and Tom both share a passion for solving murders without the aid of policemen, and Tom correctly deduces that Friedrich Hasselgard, Marita's sister, was, in fact, Marita's murderer. Lamont then shares with Tom a case of his own- that of Jeanine Thielman, who Lamont believes was murdered by a man named Anton Goetz, her lover, when she refused to continue seeing him. After getting to know each other, Tom departs from Lamont's house, taking Lamont's journal with him. Using the journal, Tom finds out that Lamont has been following the careers of those involved with the Thielman case. Over the next few days, Gloria Pasmore begins to show signs of mental illness. Friedrich Hasselgard, Marita's never-suspected murderer, is lost at sea while boating. Foxhall Edwardes, a suspect in Marita's murder, is killed in a shootout with two police officers, Mendenhall and Klink, at almost the same time. Mendenhall and Klink are both seriously injured and are committed to Shady Mount. Tom then learns that his own grandfather, Glendenning Upshaw, heard the gunshots that killed Marita on the night it happened. Dennis Handley begins to show concern for Tom at school, and Tom begins to grow closer to Sarah Spence, the classmate who visited him in the hospital. However, she is dating Buddy Redwing, another student at the school. Tom and Gloria visit Glen at his house and are greeted by Glen and his two butlers, Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley. Dr. Bonaventure Milton is also there, though he departs soon after Tom and Gloria arrive, speaking of a problem at the hospital where he works concerning Nancy Vetiver, one of the nurses who used to visit Tom when he was incapacitated. Glen prompts Tom to go to Eagle Lake for the summer, where Jeanine was killed, as it is a beautiful camping site and tourist attraction. Tom agrees to go. Sarah Spence grows distant from her boyfriend Buddy. Tom learns that Lamont doesn't want him to go to Eagle Lake, but Tom doesn't listen to him. Sarah and Tom walk together, and Sarah acts oddly nervous in front of Tom. After the walk, Tom sees a commotion at the hospital and enters, finding out that Mendenhall, one of the officers injured by Foxhall, has died. Tom discusses his theories with Dr. Bonaventure Milton, who disregards them. Tom invites Sarah to go with him and speak to Hattie Bascombe, who he thinks might live at the old slave house across town. He and Sarah drive there, and on the way, he admits that he was the one who wrote the letter to Fulton Bishop. Tom and Sarah see Milton exit Hattie's home, and go inside to talk to her. She says that Milton was talking about Tom himself and telling her not to talk to him. Hattie takes the two of them to see Nancy a few blocks away, who says that she was fired from her job at Shady Mount because she wouldn't stay away from Mendenhall while he healed, as her nursing style involves a personal connection with one's patients. Sarah and Tom return home. At the Pasmore household, Tom becomes further detached from his parents. Tom hears on the news that Klink, the only surviving officer of the Foxhall Edwardes incident, was killed by a group of criminals when he tried to prevent them from robbing a bank. Tom visits Lamont and shares the recent events with him. Lamont informs him that he was there on Calle Burleigh the day Tom almost died. Sarah and Tom board a Redwing jet with Sarah's parents to go to Eagle Lake. After an awkward conversation between the four of them, Sarah and Tom go to the back of the plane and have sex. Tom and the Spences touch down in Grand Forks, a town near Eagle Lake. Their chauffeur is Jerry Hasek, the boy who attacked Tom when he was younger. Tom recognizes and outs him in front of the astonished Spences. The five of them drive into the lodge complex and meet up with Buddy Redwing and his friend Kip Carson. Tom is to stay in Glen's old house with a woman named Barbara Deane, who used to be a nurse at Shady Mount. Tom goes into town and looks at old news articles at the library, searching for more evidence on the Jeanine Thielman case he is working on. He meets a man named Joe Truehart, and gives him a letter for Lamont. Joe doesn't mail the letter, but in fact hands it to Lamont personally, as Lamont is staying nearby to keep an eye on Tom, who is oblivious to Lamont's presence. Tom is deliberately pushed off the sidewalk and into traffic and almost killed by a speeding car, though he does not catch his attacker. He goes back to the lodge complex, and Sarah tells him that she doesn't have feelings for Buddy anymore. The next day, Tom attends dinner with all lodge guests, including the following: Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Redwing; Buddy Redwing; Kip Carson; Mr. and Mrs. Neil Langenheim; Mr. and Mrs. Bill Spence; Sarah Spence; Roddy and Buzz (a gay couple); Kate Redwing; Kate is an elderly woman who Tom asks about Jeanine Thielman. Kate tells him that she can speak about Jeanine later, but refuses to say another word on the subject during dinner. That night, Tom sees somebody creeping around Lamont's lodge with a flashlight. Unbeknownst to Tom, this person is Lamont himself. The next morning, upon returning from his walk, Barbara Deane tells him that Ralph Redwing's bodyguards came by under Buddy's orders to deliver a message to Tom: Stay away from Sarah. Barbara drives Tom into town and tells him that Anton Goetz wasn't Jeanine's killer, because Anton has a limp. Gloria Pasmore saw a man running away from the scene the night Jeanine was killed, and the man she saw did not have a limp. While Tom is walking in town, Jerry, Robbie, and Nappy pick him up in their car. Jerry tells Tom not to mention the howling, crying dog he heard on the day Tom was hit by a car years ago. They bring Tom to Buddy, who warns him once more to stay away from Sarah. The two struggle, and Tom incapacitates Buddy before escaping. Tom talks to Sarah about Jerry and she is displeased. He then sends another letter to Lamont via Joe Truehart, and goes to see Kate Redwing at her lodge. Kate tells Tom that the man Gloria saw was not Anton Goetz, clearing Anton's name, though Tom remarks that it doesn't really matter- shortly after Jeanine's death, Anton was found hanging by his neck from a rafter in his house. Tom has dinner with the guests again, and they treat him coldly on account of the happenings between Tom and Buddy. At the lodge, Tom calls his grandfather, Glen, and their phone call is interrupted when a bullet smashes his window and nearly kills him. Glen and the investigating officer, Spychalla (the deputy chief of police), both agree that it was a wild shot from a hunter. The next day, Tim Truehart (the chief of police), rules out Buddy Redwing as the shooter, though Tim believes that the shot wasn't wild. The summer passes rather uneventfully after that. Kate, Roddy, Buzz, and Kip leave. Tom finds countless letters from Sarah in his mailbox, as her parents have forbidden her to speak to him. Tom tries to call Sarah but Mr. and Mrs. Spence hang up on him. Their next group dinner is stressful and awkward. Later, Tom's schoolyard friend, Fritz Redwing, arrives in Grand Forks. Tom talks with Fritz and tells him about his relationship with Sarah. Tom goes to Barbara's house. Entering to search for her, he finds several notes from Jeanine Thielman accusing the reader of murder: "I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE... YOU MUST BE STOPPED... YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN." He also finds many newspapers accusing Barbara of several homicides over the past few years. Tom realizes that Barbara is the murderer- she killed Jeanine and then, when Anton confronted her after Lamont accused Anton of the crime, Barbara killed Anton as well and made it look like a suicide. Tom also believes that Barbara murdered Mendenhall by slipping him the wrong medication while she was on her shift at Shady Mount. Tom, Sarah, and Fritz drive to an out-of-business shed leased by the Redwings and find Nappy surrounded by many stolen items before returning anxiously back to the lodge complex. Tom is unable to reach Glen or Lamont by phone. He calls the police station about the stolen items and they turn him down. Lamont finally makes himself known to Tom at the end of the day, and he tells Tom that Tim Truehart arrested Nappy and returned the stolen items. He also reveals to Tom that Lamont is his father and Gloria Pasmore was his mother. Tom meets Sarah at his house after speaking with Lamont, and he tells her that she must keep his and Lamont's meeting a secret. That night, Tom and Sarah sleep together in the basement of Tom's lodge. When they wake up, the lodge is ablaze, and Tom saves Sarah from the blaze, however he is too late to save Barbara Deane, who burns to death in the inferno. He is committed to the hospital with severe burns. Lamont tells him that Sarah is okay, and that Ralph Redwing and his wife left for Venezuela, as well as that Jerry and Robbie had stolen a car and crashed it into a ditch before being arrested. Tom is discharged from the hospital but fakes his own death in the fire so that he's no longer under the control of Victor, Gloria, and Glen. Lamont tells Tom of a string of murders involving the words BLUE ROSE written near those killed. Attacked were 4 major characters: A prostitute, a gay piano player, a gay doctor, and a butcher. The doctor survived, and Tom is surprised to learn that the doctor is Buzz, Roddy's husband. The man who was investigating these cases killed himself soon after the butcher's death. In Tom and Lamont's hotel, Tom finds a newspaper detailing his own death. He realizes then that Glen Upshaw is the killer, not Barbara. He killed Jeanine after she threatened to expose his political corruption, and then Anton soon afterwards when Anton was blamed for the crime. Magda, Tom's grandmother, found out what a horrible person Glen was, and in a depressive state, waded into the lake and drowned herself. Tom and Lamont write I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE over and over on pieces of paper, copying Barbara Deane's notes, and mail them to Glen in order to "rattle his cage". Lamont lends Tom "The Divided Man", a novelization of the Blue Rose murders written by Timothy Underhill. Andres, Lamont's helper, drives Tom and Lamont to Glen's house and they watch his shocked expression as he opens their letters. They see him argue briefly with Fulton Bishop before they leave. The two learn that Jerry hired his friend, a man named Schilling, to shoot at Tom when he looked out the window. Tom calls Sarah and his parents, but he hangs up on the former and is disgusted with the latter when Dr. Bonaventure Milton answers the phone, suggesting that Gloria and Milton are having an affair. Lamont goes to meet Officer Natchez at a coffeeshop while Tom remains in the hotel room. When he doesn't return, Andres drives Tom to Lamont's house, where Tom finds a huge mess as well as Lamont's corpse. Tom and Andres smell cigars at the crime scene, proving that Glen was Lamont's killer. Tom and Andres speak with Natchez, who goes with them to Glen's house. The Kingsleys tell them that Glen departed after taking a call from Deputy Spychalla. It turns out that when Spychalla told Glen that they had caught the man who set Tom's lodge on fire, Glen believed he had nothing to hide from anymore and went to see Carmen Bishop, Fulton's sister, not far from where Nancy Vetiver lives. The three of them (Tom, Natchez, and Andres) travel to the Third Court in search of Glen, who they discover dated both Barbara Deane and Carmen Bishop to make himself blend in. His relationship with Carmen allowed him to corrupt Fulton and indirectly take control of the police force. In the Third Court, Natchez provokes Glen by shouting the text from Jeanine's notes. Glen fires at Tom with a pistol but misses. Natchez shoots Glen in the head, killing him as Carmen Bishop watches from the sidelines. Glen's body is taken back to his house. He had placed all filed evidence of his crimes at the house of Jerry Hasek. The three make Glen's death look like a suicide by placing his body in a position with the gun against his temple, where Natchez shot him. The Redwings travel to Switzerland and Ralph Redwing gives Fulton Bishop (who apparently escaped punishment) a job overseas. Buddy and Sarah are no longer together. The final scene of the book shows Tom and Sarah reuniting and beginning their relationship together. |
Mach 1: A Story of Planet Ionus | Allen Adler | null | While testing an experimental warship, the "Mach 1", a human pilot and his companion are kidnapped into space by aliens from the planet Ionus, which turns out to be a moon of Saturn. There, they confront an oversized monster named Karkong who is menacing the Ionians. Karkong follows them back to Earth. Chaos ensues. |
New York Dead | Stuart Woods | 1,991 | New york spelled N-E-W Y-O-R-K. is a city in America. The location where the book is set is the empire state building, in which deaths of innocent peeps (black americans) lost their precious lives from staring at the tall, symbolic building. Their bodies were burried on the roof called "Imbediona" as a symbol of this occurance. |
Dead in the Water | Stuart Woods | 1,997 | On a short vacation to escape his now hectic life in New York City, Stone Barrington set his sight on a lovely and romantic getaway to the islands of St. Marks. His companion, Arrington Carter, all-round superstar was to join him the next day. Three events would ruin Stone's plans for a romantic boat cruise about the islands and leave him in the mist of a life or death trial. One was the New York weather, snowing in every airport available. Next was the sadden and fearsome ambition of his beau, Arrington Carter, high profile host and interviewer, who decided to track down another must-have editorial. Last was the sweet and gorgeous All-American girl standing trial for murdering her husband, where if convicted meant death, by hanging. Racing to prove the young widow innocent of any wrongdoing pits Stone against a determined protector standing on the verge of becoming the next King of St. Marks. With little time to worked the case, leaving the young woman's head in a balance, Stone, once a police officer, now an up-and-coming lawyer, will do what he does best, defend his client with every skill he had to offer. Stone just hoped he didn't lose the new love of his life for his own fearsome and sadden ambition. |
The Gates of Firestorm Peak | Bruce R. Cordell | null | The Gates of Firestorm Peak begins in the Shirelands at the village of Longbridge, located in the foothills of the mountain range that contains Firestorm Peak. In prehistory, the Elder Elves thrived during a previous Age of the world, and created a magical laboratory under Firestorm Peak where they opened a gate to the Far Realm which opens every 27 years. Over time, the bizarre physical laws and alien madness of the other dimension began to warp the areas underneath the mountain. Three hundred years ago a colony of duergar settled nearby and became guardians of the corrupted area. Decades ago, the evil conjurer Madreus bypassed the duergar and gained mastery of the Far Realm creatures residing in the complex underneath Firestorm Peak. In the last five years, he gained control of the duergar, and his studies and experiments have begun to cause manifestations of warped behavior in nature and society to spread beyond the legendary mountain. If not stopped by the player characters, the gate will eventually provide Madreus with the energies and allies he needs to bring the Far Realm's madness to the rest of the world. |
Wren Journeymage | null | null | The first summer of peace brings Wren on her weekly visit to the young Queen Teressa, where she encounters the derisive, upsetting Hawk Rhiscarlan riding in! Wren races to warn Teressa, to discover he's expected, which causes the girls' first argument. Tyron gives Wren a chance to leave Meldreth by sending her on a new journeymage project--to find Connor, who had wandered off to the Summer Isles. When Wren vanishes, her scry stone abandoned, Teressa veers between regret over the argument, worry about Wren, and the beguilement of attraction as Hawk skillfully upsets her court. Wren has just made friends with some young sailors when they are captured and forced on board a shady smuggler, where Wren learns all about the sea. When pirates attack, Wren does magic, which leads her straight to another confrontation with the villain she hates most, aided by the boy she . . . what do you call these feelings? Once again the four--Wren, Teressa, Connor, and Tyron--find themselves deep in adventure, as they try to navigate the treacherous waters of growing up. |
Dead Gods | Monte Cook | null | Dead Gods is composed of two adventures which revolve around the theme of death and resurrection of a god: "Out of the Darkness" and "Into the Light". Each adventure can be played separately, although the two plots can be woven together by the Dungeon Master. "Out of the Darkness" consists of nine chapters. Long ago, Orcus the tanar'ri lord of the undead had grown fat and inattentive towards his realm in the Abyss. The minor demipower Kiaransalee, drow goddess of vengeance, conspired against Orcus and slew him, supplanting his realm and position and even banishing his name across the planes. Orcus’ corpse lay dead on the Astral Plane for some time, until he began to stir in the not-so-distant past. His form changed to become thin, small and shadowy, but rather than being truly restored to life he had become an undead god much less powerful than before. Orcus eventually disappeared from the Astral and chose a new name for himself: Tenebrous. He sought to gain revenge on everyone in the multiverse, and raised his former demonic servants as undead called visages to gather information to aid in his vengeance. He returned to an old base of his, a fortress on the Negative Energy Plane, and on the plane of Arborea he found a magical force called the Last Word which was potent enough to slay even a god. Kiaransalee had sent two of her drow followers to bury his powerful artifact, the Wand of Orcus, in an unreachable vault of stone on the plane of Pandemonium. In his search for his Wand, Tenebrous used the Last Word to slay Primus, the lord of the modrons, and using Primus's form he began using the modrons to search for his Wand. When the modrons discovered the two drow who had buried the Wand, Tenebrous began making preparations to take back the Abyss. The player characters must follow the clues to discover Tenebrous's scheme and keep the Wand away from him long enough for the power of the Last Word to consume him; if they succeed, the characters must then stop one of Orcus's followers from reviving his corpse on the Astral Plane yet again, to conclude the adventure. "Into the Light" consists of three parts, and takes place in the city of Sigil. Many years ago, the last worshippers of a dead god brought the pieces of his body from the Astral Plane to Sigil and used the body to construct a monument of five standing stones. Some time later, when the significance of the monument had been forgotten, adherents of another religion built a temple around the standing stones; in time, this religion died out and was forgotten too. This church stood vacant for centuries until bought by a wealthy man named Cruigh Manathas, who ordered his workmen to tear it down. The workmen disappeared one day – unknown to all, they had been absorbed into the standing stones, as were those who came to investigate what happened to the workmen. Secretly, a fighter named Argesh Fiord has been in control of the situation and is using it in an attempt to foment a war between some of the city's factions in revenge for the death of his wife. The player characters must uncover Fiord's plot in order to resolve the matter and prevent the war. |
Bats in the Air, Bats in My Hair | null | 2,008 | The protagonist, Sally, visits her grandmother for a night and finds unsuspected visitors in the room she is sleeping in. She awakens in the middle of the night to find bats in the room. Sally and her grandmother remove the bats from the bedroom victoriously. Sally goes to sleep and dreams of the bats. She then returns home the next morning. However a bat is hanging onto the bumper of her parent's car. |
Valley of the Flame | null | null | The year is 1985 and the location is somewhere in the vast, teeming jungles of the Amazon. Medical scientist Brian Raft and his two colleagues Dan Craddock and Bill Merriday are working at a small, newly-built health center, researching tropical diseases. They are the only white men in the vicinity and are the last outpost of civilization. Somewhere deeper in the jungle drums have been beating for days and Craddock seems convinced that they are not beating a message, rather that they have some other, more sinister purpose. Craddock, despite his medical training, is a superstitious man "with his Welsh ghosts and his shadow-people of the lost centuries", so Raft does not take much notice of him. But soon out of the unknown comes a canoe propelled by two men with paddles. They have been working themselves to the point of almost complete exhaustion. One of these newcomers, Thomas Da Fonseca, proves to be a pilot on a mapping expedition whose plane has crashed near the second man's property. This second man, Paulo da Costa Pereira, is of indeterminate origin; he speaks Portuguese, but in a faulty manner, and carries himself in a kind of confident, haughty, evasive way that annoys Raft. Da Fonseca is sick, with a temperature far below normal, and appears to have some tropical disease. Pereira, on the other hand, seems to recover remarkably quickly. Nevertheless, Raft insists, against Pereira's will, on taking a blood sample to be certain of his health. Pereira's blood seems to be strangely mutated. If anything, it works in a superior way to normal blood. Raft overhears Pereira talking to Craddock, then suddenly these two disappear. They are seen by Merriday departing in the Center's motorboat. Craddock seems to be under the hypnotic spell of Pereira. The next morning Raft, with five natives, sets out up the river in pursuit. Raft's journey will ultimately take him to the Valley of the Flame. |
The God Boy | null | null | Jimmy Sullivan is an eleven-year-old boy who lives in the town of Raggleton, an every day small town community in New Zealand. Jimmy is not like other boys his age. The home that he lives in is filled with constant arguing and bitterness between his parents. He tries to ignore these events by using special protection tricks to isolate himself from his own situation. On Tuesday afternoon he breaks down and turns violent - abusing the elderly, smashing windows and throwing rocks at Bloody Jack. Eventually his home environment changes when his mother kills his father. He is sent to a Roman Catholic boarding school and leads a very uncertain life. |
Best Friends Together | null | 1,998 | New school year starts. Chloe's friend, Emma, left school and she feels lonely. Luckily she finds a new friend, Jasmin Johnson. Jasmin helps her with sending an e-mail to Jack Kempton - a boy, whom she met during holidays in Greece. Meanwhile, Sinéad meets her friends from Burnthedge - Bianca and Abby. The girls receive presents from Sinéad - a pearl and a bracelet. When they realise how much money Sinéad's family has, they start to make Sinéad spend it for their clothes and accessories. Sinéad does not see anything wrong in it, until she overhears Bianca's and Abby's conversation about her. She ends friendship with them and finds a new friend - Chloe, who was her enemy for a while. Nick starts new school, but he is very upset. He meets Sanjay Fraser, who is short and everybody from his class think he is a weirdo. Nick talks to him, but Sanjay is sad, because Nick is tall and he always knows, what to say. Luckily, he discovers that Nick is not as self-confident as he looks and they become friends. Sanjay is very pleased with Nick being nice to his sister, Rani. Chloe has a birthday party at Jasmin's parents' cafe. She invites Nick, Sanjay, Jasmin and Sinéad. Sanjay talks to Jasmin and he falls in love with her. Sinéad wants to impress Nick, but she knows that he's in love with Chloe and she can't change it. |
Best Friends Getting Sorted | null | 1,999 | Chloe receives an e-mail from Jack. He’s got a surprise for her. Soon, she meets him in shopping centre. They're going to go to a club with Chloe's friends. Unfortunately, she sees him kissing another girl. Chloe decides to talk to his sister, Natalie, who explains her that, Jack doesn't treat anyone seriously. Chloe asks Jack to go ice-skating with her on Christmas. During their conversation, she breaks up with him. Jasmin has a date with Sanjay in the museum. Unfortunately, her mother doesn't let her go there. Sanjay is upset and he thinks that, Jasmin doesn't like him. When they meet at schools, Jasmin tells him she loves him and they become a couple. Jasmin tells her mother that, she's going to be in football team at school. But she has dates with Sanjay then, and when Jasmin's mother discovers it, she isn't angry, because she knows that she was wrong about him. Nick is still in love with Chloe and he believes that, she'll change her opinion about Jack. Unfortunately, he arrives to Leeds. Nick's mother has got problems with debts, which are still growing. His grandmother blames Nick's dad and he has enough. He runs away from home and he meets Sinéad, who wants help with homework. Nick organises football team at Lockbridge. Sinéad is in it, too, because she wants to be closer to Nick. Sanjay's father still thinks that computer animation is stupid idea for his son's future. He still wants him to be a lawyer and he invites some of his own friends, who usually ask Sanjay about his future. Sanjay brings Rani for ice-skating with his friends. Sinéad is taking care of her and they're friends. Still in love with Nick, Sinéad tries to get closer to him. Chloe helps her with choosing new clothes. Unfortunately, he still loves Chloe, but when they're ice-skating, ho holds her hand. Suddenly Sinéad breaks her ankle. Nick offers her to organise cheerleaders for football team, because Sinéad won't train for several months. |
The Patron Saint of Butterflies | null | null | Honey and Agnes are best friends growing up in Mount Blessing, a religious commune in Connecticut. Honey and Agnes could not be any more different, and the older they get the more they are growing apart. Honey was abandoned by her mother as a newborn, but she lived in the nursery with Agnes until she turned 7 years old; Honey lives with Winky and Agnes lives with her parents and her brother, Benny. Ever since Agnes got The Saints' Way (The Saints' Way is a book that everyone in Mount Blessing gets when they turn twelve; it is given by the leader Emmanuel), she has changed. Agnes now abides all the rules in Mount Blessing, and she goes by whatever Emmanuel says. Honey on the other hand, never listens to Emmanuel or Veronica, never follows the rules and hates living at Mount Blessing. Whenever they, or anyone, do something wrong they are sent to the "regulation room". There they get whipped by Emmanuel and Veronica. Everything stays this way until Nana Pete, Agnes' grandmother, shows up unexpectedly and finds out the truth behind Mount Blessing. |
Her Fearful Symmetry | Audrey Niffenegger | 2,009 | Elspeth, the aunt of two young identical twins (Julia and Valentina) dies of leukemia, leaving them her apartment which is located beside Highgate cemetery in London. The twins are Americans, having lived in Illinois with their mother, Edwina, who is Elspeth's twin sister. Edwina and Elspeth have not spoken for many years. The reason for the rift between them is a secret and is not explained to the girls. The girls have always done everything together with Julia being the more dominant twin. They move to London and take up residence in the flat. Valentina has asthma and has a heart valve that hasn't been properly formed, making her slightly ill. Robert, Elspeth's lover, lives in the apartment below and Martin, a man whose wife, Marijke, has left him because of his obsessive compulsive disorder lives in the apartment above. Robert works as a tour guide in the cemetery as a way of learning more to for his thesis on the cemetery. Valentina begins falling in love with Robert. Robert also falls in love with her mainly due to her similarity to Elspeth. Julia befriends Martin and secretly begins giving him Anafranil (a pill for OCD), pretending that it is a vitamin. Martin is aware that she is giving him the medication, but he lets her think he doesn't know. Unnoticeable to anybody for the first year, Elspeth is trapped in her apartment as a ghost; invisible and mute. However, Valentina finds that she is aware of Elspeth's moods and one day, Valentina begins to see Elspeth in the apartment. The twins find a white kitten near the cemetery and name it the little kitten of death. They attempt to trap it by leaving food and milk on the balcony, but the kitten refuses to come inside. Elspeth finally catches the kitten by enticing it to the apartment with string. Elspeth and Valentina are playing with the kitten one day and Valentina sees the kitten drop dead onto the floor. They figure out that the kitten's soul has been caught on Elspeth's hand. Elspeth puts the kitten's soul back into its body and bring it back to life. A recurring theme throughout the story is Valentina's discontent with being one half of a whole (her twinship with Julia). She is the weaker twin both physically and emotionally. Julia calls her "Mouse" because of her fearful attitude toward everything. As the story progresses, Valentina becomes stronger emotionally and decides that she must break away from Julia if she is ever to really be able to live her life. Valentina asks Elspeth to take out her soul so that everybody will think that she has died. She tells Robert of her plan and asks him to freeze and preserve her body and then for Elspeth to put her soul back into her body so that she will be free to live her life without Julia. Julia will assume she is dead and Valentina will go on with a new life minus Julia. Robert is aghast at the plan and refuses to participate. He decides to read the diaries and letters that Elspeth left him when she died. He finds out that there was no rift between Edie and Elspeth, but rather a secret they shared that made it impossible for them to be together again: The woman Robert knows as Elspeth is actually Edie and the woman everyone knows as Edie is actually Elspeth. The real Edie is the mother of Julia and Valentina. When Edie was engaged to Jack (an American working in London at the time), she was insecure about his love for her so she started pretending to be Elspeth and made advances toward Jack to test him. Jack knew that she was not Edie, but he played along. On April Fool's Day, Jack and Edie got drunk at a party and Jack slept with her and she became pregnant with the twins. Jack did not know he had slept with Edie because he was too drunk to remember it. Elspeth marries Jack, but it's Edie who moves to America with him, and has the twins - Julia and Valentina. When the girls are four months old, Edie brings them to London, and Elspeth and Edie switch places. They thought Jack didn't know about the deception, but he did. Later, Valentina, Robert, and Elspeth enact the plan to remove Valentina's soul from her body. Valentina's soul is removed and held by Elspeth. They make it look as if an asthma attack killed Valentina. Julia discovers the body and is devastated. Edie and Jack come to London from America and a funeral is held with Valentina's coffin being interred in the family mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery. In the late evening on the day of the funeral, Robert removes the body from the coffin and takes it to the flat so Elspeth can place Valentina's soul back into her body. Valentina's soul hovers over the body and Robert sees the body begin to move and life flow through it once more. He takes Valentina to his flat, and discovers that the soul inside Valentina is Elspeth. Elspeth tells Robert that Valentina wouldn't go back into her own body and just dispersed when she let her go. Elspeth decided to take over her the body after she realized Valentina wasn't going to go back inside it. Valentina becomes a ghost trapped inside the apartment, getting stronger day by day. Julia continues to live in the apartment in the hopes of being close to Valentina and one day seeing her as Valentina had seen Elspeth. Valentina and Julia do end up being able to communicate, and Valentina figures out how to leave the apartment (she has to go inside of a person's mouth and that person has to let her go). Julia takes Valentina's spirit into her mouth, goes outside, lets her out and weeps for her lost sister. Valentina goes to the mausoleum and sees that her coffin is empty. She then meets the ghost of a little girl from 19th-century England who takes her to meet other spirits. Large crows show up and the spirits shrink and get on the crows to ride them over the city as they fly. Valentina realizes that she is finally free and happy. Later, Julia goes upstairs because she hears footsteps; Martin had just left a few days ago to meet Marijke in Amsterdam and they live there now. When she goes into the apartment, she finds a handsome boy who introduces himself as Theo, Martin and Marijke's son. She asks for a ride on his motorcycle, and later it is made obvious that they are dating. One day soon after, Julia thinks she sees Valentina while out shopping. Julia grabs Valentina's arm and stares into her eyes. Julia isn't sure that this is her dead sister; however, she has suspicions. She sees that the girl she thinks is Valentina is pregnant. Elspeth (in Valentina's body) runs off and informs Robert that they need to move to Sussex so that she won't be recognized. Elspeth has always wanted to live in Sussex. Robert realizes that Elspeth is manipulative and always gets her way. They move to Sussex, where the relationship between Robert and Elspeth deteriorates with Robert ignoring her most of the time. She delivers a baby boy and one day, shortly after the child is born, Elspeth returns to their little cottage after a walk and discovers that Robert's thesis has been completed and is lying on the table. Robert is gone, never to return. |
The Land of Green Plums | Herta Müller | 1,993 | The first character introduced to the reader is a young girl named Lola, who shares a room with five other girls, including the narrator, in a college dormitory. Lola records her experiences in a diary, relating her efforts to escape from the totalitarian world of school and society by riding the buses at night and having brutish, anonymous sex with men returning home from factory work. She also has an affair with the gym teacher, and soon joins the Communist Party. This first part of the book ends when Lola is found hanging in the closet; she has left her diary in the narrator's suitcase. Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college and engage in mildly subversive activities—"harbouring unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites." in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four and begins to subject them to regular interrogations. Their possessions are searched, their mail opened, and they are threatened by the captain and his dog. After graduation the four go their separate ways, but they remain in contact through letters and regular visits, although their letters are read by the Securitate. They take menial jobs: Kurt works in a slaughterhouse as a supervisor, for instance, and the narrator translates German manuals in a factory. A fifth member, Tereza, befriends the narrator even as it becomes clear that she is acting partly on Pjele's orders. The lives of all five become more miserable, and each conforms to the regime's demands even as they lose their jobs for apparently political reasons. They discuss fleeing the country, and Georg is the first to do so; weeks after he arrives in Germany, he commits suicide by jumping out the window of a Frankfurt hotel. The narrator and Edgar likewise acquire passports and go to Germany, still receiving death threats. Kurt remains in Romania, no longer working, and later found hanged. The novel ends with the same passage as it began: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves". |
The Unincorporated Man | null | 2,009 | A successful industrialist named Justin Cord, frozen in secret in the early twenty-first century, is discovered and resurrected in the 24th century. He is given health and a vigorous younger body, as well as the promise of wealth and fame. There's only one problem: He remains the only unincorporated man in the world. Justin cannot accept only part ownership of himself, even if that places him in conflict with a civilization that extends outside the solar system, to the Oort Cloud and beyond. |
Best Friends in Love | null | 1,999 | Chloe realises that Nick loves her. She decides to be his girlfriend, but Sinéad is first. Ms. Sanderson tells her that Nick will get bored of her and break up. Chloe can't make her change her mind, so she gives up, because she's got other problems. Chloe's mother is still a victim of house violence. When she gets an offer to interview a famous actress, she disagrees, because new film is about wives, who are beat by their own husbands. In the end she decides to live Edward and move to London with Chloe. Jasmin still goes out with Sanjay. Unfortunately, when she discovers that, he's got a chance to move to Beckedon high school in London, she's upset, because they won't see each other for a long time. Even though, she tells him to go there and try to win the scholarship. When he makes it, she's very happy. They engage after the exams. Meanwhile, Jasmin's mother is meeting one man. The girl suspects that, it's a romance. Luckily, this man is from gospel choir and he talks to Josephine about being in it. Next to Nick’s house a mysterious man, Mike Lovell appears. The boy tells him that Bowens don’t live in Leeds, because he thinks that Lovell wants his money back. Some weeks later, Jenny Bowen invites him for a tea and he tells that he was Greg’s friend. He didn’t know about his Heath and He wanted to find his family. Thanks to Mike, Jenny could buy Josephine’s shares at the cafe. Meanwhile, Nick discovers that, he likes Sinéad much more. Once he invites her for pizza and then he kisses her. They become a couple. Sanjay’s father isn’t happy of son’s choice. But when Sanjay show him a brochure of Beckedon school, he tells his son to try to win the scholarship. He doesn’t like Jasmin’s reaction, because he suspected that she’ll cry and tell him to stay. Sinéad at last is Nick’s girlfriend. She’s very happy, but her family’s got another problem – Shaun Flaherty bought a pony, which doesn’t win any race. He stops to spend the money, when his workshop is arsoned. The Flahertys move to a smaller house. Sinéad meets her friends in a club, where everybody swears to keep their friendship forever. |
Life on Another Planet | null | null | An artificial radio signal from Barnard's Star listing prime numbers (although the term "prime" is never used in the story) is received at the Mesa Radio Astronomy Observatory. One of the radio-astronomers is a Russian spy and tries to inform his superiors; however he is uncovered by his fellows and subsequently killed. The CIA hires James Bludd, a prominent astrophysicist, to try to understand what is going on. Several plotlines follow and intertwine, most of them centering around personal greed. News of the extraterrestrial message leaks to the outside world, with different consequences. A bum and a waitress build a cult, calling themselves the Star People, which seeks to find a new home on the Barnard's planet. Multinational, a corporation, decides to invest money into the cult, in order to have an easy to manipulate spaceship crew ready to take possession of the inhabited planet on behalf of the company. A dying biologist, Dr.Crowben, decides to push on the creation of plant-human hybrids biologically suited to the planet environment, which also this plan falls within the scope of the Multinational. Meanwhile, the two surviving astrophysicists have been abducted by the KGB, and Bludd learns that Russians plan to answer to the signal using neutrinos. The international situation further complicates when a small fictional African state, Sidiami, burdened by debts with other countries, decides to "secede from planet Earth" and declares itself a colony of the planet around Barnard. The "Star People" decide to relocate in Sidiami, and the Multinational starts plans to launch a probe towards the Barnard's planet from there. James Bludd finds himself implicated in the ongoing struggle between the USA, the Multinational and the "Star People" to get advantage of the situation. At the end, the space probe is launched towards the Barnard's planet. Bludd, convinced that humankind is not ready for contact with aliens, has sabotaged it and after a while makes it explode with the aid of a remote control. When later, in the observatory, a new possible artificial extraterrestrial signal is received from space, Bludd destroys all evidence of it with a smile. |
Total chaos | Jean-Claude Izzo | 1,995 | The story takes place in Marseille during summer. Fabio Montale, a suburban-Marseille cop, sees his two closest childhood friends die one-by-one in violent circumstances. One was killed without anyone knowing why, the other was killed immediately after assassinating one of the leaders of the local underworld. Montale tries to understand what happened and gradually discovers a tangle of interests and power struggles within the Marseilles underworld and police. |
What a Week to Get Real | null | 2,005 | Jade is going to Paris with her grandmother. She meets a boy - Flynn Jackson - in the train to Brighton. They become friends. Flynn lives in Dunchester, so Jade can see him. They fall in love with each other quickly. Jade is trying to help Tansy with Andy, who doesn't talk to her. She sends text messages, which are supposed to be from Tansy. Cleo is still in love with Angus. But he only pretends to be interested with her. He shows his parents that he's normal by "going out" with Cleo. The girl sings with his and Kyle's band on the music festival. But they don't win the price. Cleo breaks up with Angus, because she is upset of being not exactly his girlfriend. She could also see that, Angus is more interested in Kyle. Holly's parents want to sell their house. The buyers are Walker family - Angus and his parents. Unfortunately, before selling a house there is a fire in it that burns the whole house. Holly saved her nephew from sthe burning house, but she had to stay at the hospital, because she had burns on her legs. She still is afraid of the fire and sometimes she has panic attack. Tansy's private life is complicated. Andy doesn't talk to her and she doesn't know why. Then she discovers that he went to a party and he got drunk. He also was kissing Melanie, who is Tansy's rival. Luckily, he explains her everything and they are together again. |
Frankensteins of Fraud | null | null | Frankensteins of Fraud covers the following criminals and their activities: *Charles Ponzi, father of the Ponzi scheme who arrived in America with as little as $2.50 dollars in his pocket and soon grew to earn millions by conning thousands of working people. *Cassie Chadwick, the daughter of Andrew Carnegie who was supposed to inherit $400 million had her opportunities created for her by tons of banks agreeing to loan her big money for interest rates going off the roofs, little did they know they couldn't fool the most notorious woman of her time. *Ivar Kreuger made billions until he was destroyed by the stock market crash of 1929. *Phillip Musica, aka F. Donald Coster, M.D., Ph.D also the CEO of McKesson and Robbins Pharmaceuticals swindled millions of dollars from his own company. *Robert Vesco, whose handling of mutual funds led to the SEC making him a fugitive and sending him on a 30 year crime spree until he was caught. *Stanley Goldblum, most famous for his 2 billion dollar Equity Funding Insurance Scam. *John Bennett who used charitable organizations to come up with his very own Ponzi scheme along with "Crazy Eddie", Mark Whitacre and Michael Milken. |
The Letters | null | null | While Sam and Hadley are thousands of miles apart, waiting for their divorce to come through, they begin to exchange letters. The letters start out with Sam and Hadley West trying to come to terms with the death of their only child and son Paul. Sam believes that going to Alaska and taking the dangerous trek by plane and dog sled to see the place where Paul died will help him come to terms with his son’s death. Hadley chose Monhegan because she felt like she needed to get away and she liked the idea that it was an artist’s colony in the summer. |
Montecore: en unik tiger | null | null | In Montecore, the author Jonas Hassen Khemiri receives an e-mail from Kadir, a childhood friend of Jonas’ father. Kadir urges Jonas to write a book about the father, a famous photographer who has disappeared. Kadir’s letters are mixed with Jonas’ memories from his own childhood. Inspired by Kadir, he writes a story about coming to age in a country where tolerance and diversity are the bywords of the day, but where racism and xenophobia form part of everyday life. |
Meteor! | null | null | The novel tells the story of Patricia, her brother Steve, and her cousin Steve spending the summer at their grandparents' farm in Union City, Michigan. Late one night while sitting in their cozy home, a bright light falls from the sky landing in the Gaw’s farm with a loud crash. Curiosity overcomes the family as they set foot outside to find a fallen star in their backyard. One line in the book reads, “Of all the places on earth a meteor could have fallen, it landed smack-dab in the middle of our yard, Gramma exclaimed.” This was such a huge deal for the residents of Mudsock Medow. Word gets around quickly, and before long there is a carnival at the Gaw farm. There is a band, a circus, a hot air balloon, and more. The entire town gathers to celebrate the meteor. Many residents touched the meteor claiming it was magical. It seemed like magic to all that the fallen star, which flew through the galaxy, had landed in Union City and brought such joy to all. |
New York | Edward Rutherfurd | 2,009 | The novel chronicles the birth and growth of New York City, from the arrival of the first European colonists in the 17th century right up to the summer of 2009. As in previous Rutherfurd historical novels, the reader experiences the history of the place through the histories of fictional families who live there. In New York, these families represent the successive waves of immigrants who gave the city its multicultural character. The early Dutch founders of New Amsterdam are typified by the Van Dyck family, who prosper in trade with the Native Americans; both the local Algonquian tribes and the Mohawk who lived farther up the Hudson Valley. The Van Dycks soon unite with the English Master family. The Van Dyck-Masters remain in New York through the entire saga, providing one of the unifying narrative strands. We also meet Quash, an African slave and unwilling immigrant to New Amsterdam, whose descendants also become part of the New York cultural mix. As the history progresses through the years, we meet more fictional families: the Irish O'Donnells, the German Kellers, the Italian Carusos, the Jewish Adlers, the Puerto Rican Campos's. Their intertwining stories, which include looks at the family cultural traditions of the various groups and intercultural relations, play out against the historical backdrop of the great city. Because the main characters in New York are members of the fictional families, the story lines sometimes take the reader away from the city. One chapter takes place in Georgian London. Another follows Washington's army through Valley Forge to Yorktown. But most of the wanderers return home in the end. Rutherfurd breaks the narrative into sections by date, twenty-seven in all. Most dates comprise one chapter; a few dates continue through two or three chapters. A set of three well-drawn maps of Manhattan Island helps the reader follow the action as the city grows and evolves. A fourth map, of the New York City region, provides a larger geographical context. |
The Sundowners | Jon Cleary | 1,952 | The story is set in the Australian Outback during the 1920's and deals with one year in the life of the Carmody family. Paddy Carmody, Australian-born son of Irish migrants, is an itinerant worker, travelling the country with his wife Ida and son Sean in a horse-drawn wagon. Whilst Ida longs to settle in a place of their own, Paddy is unwilling to abandon his way of life and continues to pick up work where he can. He takes cattle-droving jobs and also sheep-shearing - which he doesn't like, but pays well. At one point, he joins a shearing team with Sean as tarboy and Ida as the shearers cook. They meet various colourful outback characters, ranging from prosperous graziers to drunks, including Rupert Venneker, a well-educated Englishman in self-imposed exile. Along the way. Sean develops from boy into young man. Venneker marries and settles in a small town. And the Carmodys continue on their way. |
Web mortem | null | null | St Andrews in Scotland is the scene of several horrible murders. All the victims are people from the Middle East and without any legal papers. Hammond MacLeod, a young and distinguished dean at University of St Andrews, soon finds the body of his current mistress as well. Has he harbored a secret motive for killing her so atrociously? Why does he spend so much time on this online game? Soon, he realizes that he cannot deal with suspicion anymore. He runs away to New York, helped by Willow Owen, a young American reporter. But behind the web, the killer is lurking. In order to be cleared, Hammond must delve into the online game. This one, by featuring Mesopotamia's darkest and oldest history, asks online players to designate the next victim. And soon, Hammond and Willow are caught in the game. When they understand it is linked to the landscapes of ancient languages as well as to passionate but destructive human relationships, it is too late... |
Logicomix | Christos Papadimitriou | null | Set between the late 19th century and present-day, the graphic novel Logicomix is based on the story of the so-called "foundational quest" in mathematics. Logicomix intertwines the philosophical struggles with the characters' own personal turmoil. These are in turn played out just upstage of the momentous historical events of the era and the ideological battles which gave rise to them. The narrator of the story is Bertrand Russell, who stands as an icon of many of these themes: a deeply sensitive and introspective man, Russell was not just a philosopher and pacifist, he was also one of the prominent figures in the foundational quest. Russell's life story, depicted by Logicomix, is itself a journey through the goals and struggles, and triumph and tragedy shared by many great thinkers of the 20th century: Georg Cantor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, David Hilbert, Gottlob Frege, Henri Poincaré, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing. A parallel tale, set in present-day Athens, records the creators’ disagreement on the meaning of the story, thus setting in relief the foundational quest as a quintessentially modern adventure. It is on the one hand a tragedy of the hubris of rationalism, which descends inextricably on madness, and on the other an origin myth of the computer. |
Requiem for a Fish | null | 2,005 | The coelacanth is a very strange fish. On the one hand, this ancient species might have been the missing link between land and sea. On the other hand, everybody thought that it had disappeared long before dinosaurs' extinction. Yet, one day of 1938, a South African fisherman catches a specimen in its nets. But is the fish really the famous coelacanth? The world of science gets passionate and jealous around the beast. Who will be the first to trace the origins of mankind? Stealing, cheating, lying... murdering? And Why is Marie, this young pregnant Parisian, suddenly caught in this story? Between Africa and the Comoro Islands, the Comoro Islands and Sulawesi, London and Paris, the world of ichthyology turns to a gripping thriller. |
A Brief History of Anxiety | Patricia Pearson | null | The book consists of nine chapters and a section of endnotes. All of the chapters combine narrative, personal reflection, historiography, and social commentary. Pearson's style is evident in the beginning to the eighth chapter, "2001: A Drugs Odyssey": In this book, Pearson frequently challenges generally accepted layman views about mental health and mental health treatment. "The idea that people need antidepressants because they have a 'chemical imbalance' in their brains," she says at one point, "has evolved into a sort of urban legend." She states that "[t]he trouble with this soothing explanation...is that serotonin deficiency is an unsupportable claim." Pearson also challenges conventional medical wisdom: at one point, she states that, although some psychoactive medications target dopamine in the brain, over 85 percent of the body's dopamine is found outside the brain, and the medications' effect on those other tissues is almost completely unresearched. The Notes section contains 172 references ranging from scholarly articles to the poetry of William James and the philosophical writings of Søren Kierkegaard. |
This Book Is Not Good for You | Pseudonymous Bosch | 2,009 | The novel starts out with an African girl named Simone, who tastes a piece of chocolate for the Midnight Sun (as the book centers around the sense of taste, like the first novel, which centers around scent, and the second, which centers around the sense of sound). It is noted that she is a Supertaster, and is able to distinguish between almost any food, no matter how similar they are. Immediately after tasting the chocolate, she blacks out. Meanwhile, Max-Ernest and Cass, two members of the Terces Society and the two protagonists of the series, are searching for the box in which the letter was found when she was a baby, as she earlier found out she was adopted and wants to find out more about who she is. While they search, they find a box filled with magazines that was dropped off at the front door of Cass's grandfathers' old, abandoned fire station, where the grandfathers live. Max-Ernest points out a magazine with a picture of the Skelton Sisters on the cover, the teen pop stars who were known by the two collaborators as being members of the Midnight Sun. Knowing this, the kids become suspicious of what they are doing, and discover that they are with Ms. Mauvais, the French woman who is one of the most evil leaders of the Midnight Sun, and that they have established headquarters in the country Côte d'Ivoire in Africa, where they take care of orphans and work on a chocolate plantation. Cass and Max-Ernest head to the old circus, where the Terces Society (which consists of Pietro Bergamo, the retired magician whose brother, Luciano, otherwise known as Dr. L, was captured by Ms. Mauvais and is now one of the leaders of the Midnight Sun; Mr. Wallace, an accountant who works as the society's archivist; Lily Wei, a Chinese violinist who escaped the Midnight Sun and is now the head of physical defense and martial arts, and Owen, an actor who appears as many different people in the series and acts as somewhat like a spy for the society) to tell Pietro and the others where the Midnight Sun is hiding. Mr. Wallace tells them that he thinks the legendary Tuning Fork is involved in the spa's plan with chocolate. Later, Cass and her mother, Melanie, or "Mel" for short, sign up for a cooking class run by the famous blind chef, Señor Hugo. After bringing up the subject of the Tuning Fork, Cass is invited to Hugo's famous restaurant with her mother, Max-Ernest, and other friend, Yoji, or "Yo-Yoji." At the restaurant, the kids and Mel discover that it is extremely dark to the point where no one can see anything, since Hugo wants the diners' other senses, especially taste, to be heightened during their meal. After trying many different foods, Cass sees that her mother is gone. Outside, she reads the note given to her by the waiter from Señor Hugo, which demands the Tuning Fork in return for her mother. Later at the fire station, Cass and her friends search for the Tuning Fork, as they were told earlier by Mr. Wallace that by now the Fork, which was originally possessed by the Aztec boy "Caca Boy", would probably have ended up in a junk shop, and assumed that the junk shop he was talking about could only be Cass's grandfather's home. While searching, Cass finds the box in which she was dropped off by Mr. Wallace, and then sees on a television that the kids' principal, Mrs. Johnson, is in possession of the Tuning Fork. The kids head to her house and blackmail her into giving them the Fork. Cass then gives Señor Hugo the Fork at her house, finding out that he is in fact part of the Midnight Sun, and will not give her back her mother as she told her friends what he had done, when she had been told not to. Meanwhile, the girl, Simone, awakes from her faint and finds a woman named Melanie in her cell. Mel gives her comfort and tells her that she has a daughter like her, and gives Simone comfort, telling her that her parents must have loved her and thought it best to send her to the plantation. Mel is then called to the Tasting Room, and Simone warns her not to eat any chocolate. At Yo-Yoji's house, Cass, Max-Ernest, and Yo-Yoji investigate the pictures of the Midnight Sun at the plantation in the magazine, looking for clues. They discover that they are at a zoo, and are in fact not in Africa, but are located inside an artificial rainforest park somewhere in the United States (as the series is meant to be secret, the author states that he cannot identify the exact place in the country in which the park is located). After taking a train to the park, the kids camp out there and later journey through the rainforest, locating the plantation with the help of a Capuchin monkey. Hiding in the cacao trees on the plantation, the kids witness Ms. Mauvais herself talking to an elderly man, Itamar, who made a brief appearance in the first book, and dies a few days later. They also discover that Ms. Mauvais' first name is "Antoinette." The trio then find a building called the "Pavilion," where the Tasting Room is located (the very place in which Simone tasted chocolate for the Midnight Sun). The kids find three pieces of chocolate on a table, which is in fact a trap placed by the Midnight Sun. Cass and Yo-Yoji eat a piece each, though Max-Ernest refrains from eating due to his assumption of being allergic to chocolate. As Max-Ernest watches them fall into trances, Cass "dreams" about her and the Jester—a man from whom Cass is descended, and is the founder of the Terces Society—and their conversation about the Secret. When Cass wakes up, the three Midnight Sun members, Ms. Mauvais, Dr. L, and Señor Hugo demand her to tell them the Secret, as they believe the chocolate took her back in time to the Jester and was told the Secret. Cass truthfully admits that she does not remember the Secret, and they take her away to Simone's cell, which is right next to her mother's. Yo-Yoji, meanwhile, has disappeared, and Max-Ernest is the only one who can rescue the two kids. Max-Ernest eventually catches up with Yo-Yoji. Since Yo-Yoji fell into a trance that has him believing he is an ancient Samurai warrior, Max-Ernest was able to control him and command him to rescue Cass, her mother, and Simone. The kids go to get back the Tuning Fork from Hugo, rescue the orphans (who were really made slaves by the Midnight Sun), and finally escape the Midnight Sun. Later at Cass's house, Cass and Max-Ernest use the Tuning Fork to revive Yo-Yoji back to his normal self. The story ends with Cass being told by Pietro that she is the new Secret-Keeper,Max-Ernest tells Cass his parents are back together again and begins to like chocolate.Then eating the piece of chocolate Hugo had made for her, Cass falling into yet another trance. The story continues in the sequel, This Isn't What It Looks Like, with Cass in a coma as the piece of chocolate was exceptionally strong, and Max-Ernest trying to rescue her. |
In the Hand of Dante | Nick Tosches | null | The book interweaves two separate stories, one set in the 14th century in Italy and Sicily and featuring Dante Alighieri, and another set in the autumn of 2001 and featuring a fictionalized version of Nick Tosches as the protagonist. The historical and modern stories alternate as Dante tries to finish writing his magnum opus and goes on a journey for mystical knowledge in Sicily. Meanwhile Tosches, as something of a Dante expert, is called in by black market traders to attest to the authenticity of a manuscript of The Divine Comedy supposedly written by Dante himself. Included in the modern sections of the book are musings by Tosches on the state of modern publishing, the futility of excessively flowery poetry and prose, references to his own previous books (including a lengthy passage directly out of the introduction to The Nick Tosches Reader), the September 11th attacks, and the Rolling Stones. Louie Brunellesches, a small-time New York gangster who also appears in Tosches' novel Cut Numbers, returns in a smaller role, making this something of a sequel. |
Noir austral | null | null | The book begins with a dive into the journey of an Aboriginal tribe which, in 70,000 BCE, crosses the straits of Sunda toward what will become Australia. It is a chaotic and cadaver-ridden course and a fight against climatic evolution. Through centuries, the odyssey reveals a challenging cohabitation with other species and soon a violent confrontation with white Caucasian newcomers. In an additional contemporary plot, Liz, a young Australian woman, moves to France in search of her lost origins. But behind its postcard appearance, the small Provence village where her mother had lived is not what it seems to be. Somebody tries to drown Liz into the pond near her new house, just before the young woman finds a dead body in this pond. Liz is still far from knowing what or who she will have to fight, what or who has followed her from Sydney, from a past that she did not even suspect. Besides the criminal aspects, the story is a novelistic presentation of the history of humankind, trying to make the reader look at the world differently and make them understand that differences are really relative. |
Point Omega | Don DeLillo | 2,010 | According to the Scribner 2010 catalog made available on October 12, 2009, Point Omega concerns the following: In the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. This was prompted by an article he wrote explicating and parsing the word "rendition". They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts - to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create "Bulk and swagger," he called it. He was to conceptualize the war as a haiku. "I wanted a war in three lines..." At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character - "Just a man against a wall." The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits - an "otherworldly" woman from New York - who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. Jessie is strange and detached but Elster adores her. Elster explains how she is of high intelligence and remarks that she can determine what people are saying in advance of hearing the words by reading lips. Jim is sexually drawn to her but nothing happens except his watching her as a voyeur would. After the most pointed of such behavior Jessie disappears without a trace. Line two of the haiku structure (see below) winds up with the disbelief and grieving over Jessie; there are attempts to find her; there are references to a boyfriend or acquaintance named (maybe) Dennis. Jessie's mother had sent her to the desert to get away from this man. In light of this devastating event, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible. The novel is structured like a haiku to provide the illusion of self-contained meaning. Lines one and three take place on September 3 and then September 4. The viewpoint is that of an anonymous man watching a work of conceptual art (24 Hour Psycho) that involves Psycho slowed down, broken down so that it takes 24 hours to play. The man mostly stands against a wall in the exhibition room and obsesses about the details and concepts of the work in hopes of willfully losing himself in Psycho (a kind of self-rendition). He attends the exhibition every day, all day. In Line one, Elster and Jim make a brief appearance. The man assumes they are academics, film critics and doesn't understand why they leave so quickly. In Line two, we meet Jim and Elster and the main "action" of the novel takes place (temporally after Lines one and three). Jim is a filmmaker obsessed with the medium. His one previous work was, as his estranged wife remarked, a film about an idea. It seems to involve a pastiche of Jerry Lewis in performance mode at his famous telethons. Only Jerry Lewis appears in the film; only Elster will appear in the film Jim proposes to him. Elster refuses to agree to the idea but strings Jim along out in the desert where he does reveal a little about his intellectual provenance including his study of Teilhard de Chardin (whose principle idea is of a universe moving toward greater complexity and consciousness). In Line three, Jessie goes to the Psycho exhibit and meets the man on the wall. She tells him her father recommended the exhibit. We already know that Jim recommended it to Elster and took him to the exhibit. The man on the wall tries to arrange a date with Jessie. He gets her phone number but not her name. Line three ends with the man returning to the exhibit. The direction of the novel is the opposite of movement toward greater complexity and consciousness. It is toward a self-contained, self-defining and blind will to power. That is the idea behind the government's notion of war as haiku. Elster's parsing of the word rendition is no different than Psycho in slo-mo: murder disassociated from its reality by clinical and abstract analysis. The novel's central metaphor is autism. The man on the wall (in either manifestation) and Jessie are obviously symptomatic. Jim and Elster are no better. The signs are there: Jerry Lewis, Psycho in slo-mo, war as haiku, the desert with Elster's solace in it as signifier for total annihilation, the word rendition. There are clear parallels to Thomas Pynchon especially in Gravity's Rainbow. In Pynchon the tension balances along the relationship between knowledge (greater complexity?) and a death instinct; capitalism or western civilization as a death cult. In Point Omega the movement toward annihilation (rendition) is symptomatic of a defect or disturbance in mental process. We are truly in the age of autism. In his review for Publishers Weekly, Dan Fesperman revealed that the Finley character is "...a middle-aged filmmaker who, in the words of his estranged wife, is too serious about art but not serious enough about life" and compares Elster to "a sort of Bush-era Dr. Strangelove without the accent or the comic props". Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Altar described the novel as "...a meditation on time, extinction, aging and death, subjects that Mr. DeLillo seldom explored in much depth as a younger writer." |
Manxmouse | null | null | A ceramicist who lives in the fictional city of Buntingdowndale in England specializes in making ceramic replicas of mice. One night he gets drunk at a party and comes home intending to make the best mouse figurine he has ever made. With his senses impaired, he inadvertently makes a mouse-like figure described as having a "fat little body like a opossum, hind feet like those of a kangaroo, the front paws of a monkey, and instead of delicate and transparent ears, these were long and much like those of a rabbit. And what is more, they were blue, too, and violently orange-colored on the inside. But the worst thing of all was that it had no tail." He is disappointed but finds that the statue has an endearing look, so he calls it a "Manx Mouse" and decides to keep it. That night while the ceramacist slept, the statue comes to life as a Manx Mouse. The Manx Mouse thinks for himself, and refers to himself by the name Manxmouse. He decides to leave the ceramacist's home and travel. He first meets a clutterbumph, which is a shapeshifting monster that takes the form of whatever those around it fear most. Manxmouse seems to have no fear, and thus the clutterbumph does not scare him, but tells him to "beware the Manx Cat". Manxmouse leaves that encounter and has a succession of encounters with other entities, including a billibird, House Cat mother, old One-Eye the cat, Captain Hawk, a fox named Joe Reynard, a fox-hunting pack of dogs led by General Hound and called the Bumbleton Hunt, Squire Ffuffer the huntsman, Nelly the Elephant, a little girl named Wendy H. Troy, a tiger named Burra Khan, a truck driver, Mr. Smeater the pet-shop proprietor, a semi-animate wax copy of himself at Madame Tussauds, and a policeman. In each encounter, Manxmouse behaves politely, helpfully, and bravely, and in almost all cases when he leaves one new friend that he has made, that friend warns him that he belongs to Manx Cat and that Manx Cat will eat him. Finally Manxmouse goes to the Isle of Man to meet Manx Cat. Surprisingly to Manx Mouse, Manx Cat is a proper British gentleman who invites him to tea in his home with his family. During tea, Manx Cat produces a document he calls a Doom, which he says is a prophecy written 1000 years ago specifying a date when the Manx Mouse would come to the Manx Cat to be eaten, and coincidentally Manxmouse has arrived at the specified time. Part of the document is missing, but it seems irrelevant to all parties involved at this time. Manxmouse and Manx Cat go to a stadium where they appear before a crowd including everyone that Manxmouse has met in his adventures. The policeman Manxmouse had already met mediates the event, saying that Manxmouse should be quickly and painlessly swallowed. But when the time comes for Manxmouse to be eaten, he takes a fighting posture and challenges Manx Cat to eat him. A representative from Madame Tussauds appears at this time and exhibits the other half of the Doom document. The other half says, "But if the aforesaid Manxmouse instead of yielding and being swallowed shall take a firm stand in his defense and bravely and gallantly show that he means to fight for his life, then the Doom shall become inoperative, null and void and canceled. Manxmouse and Manx Cat shall live in peace forever after." The crowd cheers, Manxmouse and Manx Cat both agree to live by these terms of the Doom, and years later they remain neighbors as Manx Mouse starts his own family with a local field mouse as a wife. |
Destry Rides Again | Frederick Schiller Faust | 1,930 | Harrison Destry, broke and jobless, begins the novel by returning to his native town of Wham, in Texas. He is scorned by the many enemies he has made there, including rich rancher's daughter Charlotte Dangerfield. Only one of the men that Destry has previously beaten with his fists, Chester Bent, seems to bear him no ill-will; he stakes the penniless Destry to a hundred dollars. But Bent's generosity is a ploy. Bent has just robbed the Express, and knowing Destry's wasteful way with money, he expects that Destry's wild spending will make him a prime suspect for the robbery. Bent's plan works to perfection. Destry goes on a wild drinking spree at a local saloon, and is arrested for the robbery. Failing to comprehend how much trouble he is in, Destry neglects his defense and is stunned to be convicted by a jury stacked with his enemies and then sentenced to ten years for the robbery by a judge who considers him a proven troublemaker. Destry protests his innocence and swears to visit each of the twelve jurors when he is out of prison. Only Charlotte believes that Destry is not guilty. Six years later, Destry is released from prison early for good behavior. He sets about systematically ruining the lives of the twelve jurors. He does not murder any of them outright, although he kills some of them in self-defense. Destry explains that he is determined to stay within the law from now on (although some of his actions, such as trespassing and safe-cracking, are in fact of extremely dubious legality). His chief concern is to show that none of the "jury of his peers" is, in fact, his equal. Destry remains ignorant of Chester Bent's role in framing him; Bent is the only man in Wham who treats Destry kindly upon his release, and Destry comes to count Bent as his best friend. But Bent is secretly conspiring to have Destry killed, and helps the jurors organize to murder their nemesis. While on the run, Destry meets a boy named Willie Thornton, who adopts Destry as his hero. Thornton later secretly observes Bent murdering a creditor. Bent uses Destry's knife to kill his victim, in order to frame Destry again. Bent then spots Thornton and chases him; Thornton escapes only by diving into a raging river, from which he emerges weak and sick. Although feverish, Thornton steals a horse and makes a long, hard ride back to Wham to warn Destry of Bent's treachery. So warned, Destry fights his way out of a trap that Bent has laid for him. The sheriff of Wham, Ding Slater, deputizes Destry, and Destry tries to arrest Bent. But Bent outdraws Destry and shoots his Colt out of his hand; Destry is saved only by sheriff Slater's gunfire from the window. Bent flees, with Destry in pursuit. Overtaking Bent, Destry unhorses his enemy, but Bent then overpowers Destry and leaps onto Destry's horse, making a last mad dash for freedom. In a most uncharacteristic climax for a western, Destry shoots Bent in the back as the unarmed man flees. Returning to the devoted Charlotte Dangerfield, Destry announces that he will lay down his guns forever, acknowledging that he had found his peer in Bent. |
The Quiet War | Paul McAuley | 2,008 | The Quiet War is a space opera set in the 23rd Century. Some of the Earth's population has fled the planet due to war and catastrophic climate change. In the aftermath of climatic disaster and massive loss of life, humanity has consolidated into three superpowers that control the planet. The population that fled the planet initially colonized the Moon and Mars, but these colonies were destroyed by hostile forces from Earth. The pioneers—or "Outers" as they came to be known—eventually settled among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The Outers have survived by using highly advanced genetic engineering and their pure determination for a free life. They've formed a loose form of democracy which over the course of centuries has been dominated by long-lived humans who still remember the events which caused them to flee Earth. The Earthly superpowers have struggled to rebuild the planet. The most powerful and aggressive superpower is Greater Brazil, a nation controlling both South and the remains of North America. North America has been devastated by climate change, which caused the destruction of civilization there, with few cities left populated. Greater Brazil has taken over this desert continent and forced the population to live by their "green" politics whereby the population lives in cities while the open land is being restored to a pristine natural state. Greater Brazil is a corrupt state run by a handful of powerful families; it is anti-democratic and culturally conservative. It is semi-feudal; people who are not related to the ruling families by blood or marriage are essentially property, like medieval serfs. Greater Brazil is threatened by the very existence of the democratic and technologically dynamic Outer colonies, while at the same time greedy for the benefits of Outer technology. Genetic engineering is a particularly touchy subject for Greater Brazil, which interprets extensive "cutting", as they call it, to be against their green political and religious philosophies. For all of these reasons, Greater Brazil wishes to subdue the Outers and bring them under their control. The novel follows the lives of a small set of individuals, all of them from Greater Brazil, who become caught up in the events set in motion by Greater Brazil's designs for the Outer colonies. These central characters include an arrogant but brilliant "gene wizard"; a space fighter pilot to whom the gene wizard gives extraordinary powers; a cloned assassin designed by the gene wizard to infiltrate the Outers; a soil biologist who is recruited for a joint Earth-Outer goodwill project; and an unprincipled, ambitious weasel of a man who does his superiors' dirty work. The events of the novel were followed up in 2009 with McAuley's Gardens of the Sun, sequel to The Quiet War. |
Touch the Dark | null | 2,006 | Cassandra Palmer is a clairvoyant. She can see visions of the future as well as communicate with the spirits of the dead. These unusual gifts make her make her attractive to both the dead and the undead. Ghosts recognise that Cassandra is one of the rare people who can actually see them so they love to talk to her and all in all they are fairly harmless. However undead vampires are not so harmless. Ever since she was a child Cassie had been forced to work for Tony, a ruthless vampire Mafioso. She managed to escape from him three years ago but has been on the run ever since. When he finds her and sends his vampire thugs to kill her she is forced to turn to the Vampire senate for protection. Raised by vampires from childhood she knows that vampires are not motivated to act out of kindness. They will definitely want something in return but what will it be and is it something that she is willing to give? While she is meeting with the senate, a rogue vampire launches an assassination attempt on the senate's members and it becomes clear to Cassie that the vampires have problems of their own. In fact the whole magical world is on the brink of war with itself due to the Pythia (a powerful seer and the Guardian of Time) being on her deathbed and the official heir to her powers being mysteriously missing. Every faction of magical being, light or dark, appears to be jostling for position at this time of upheaval and every one wants control of the Pythia and her powers. As Cassie starts to have powerful visions of the past, it becomes apparent that her powers are changing. As one of the heirs to the Pythia she seems to be acquiring her new skills as power leaches out of the old Pythia. Cassie has enough knowledge of vampire ways to know that if she was attractive to them as a clairvoyant, as a potential Pythia they will never let her go…. In Touch the Dark, Cassandra "Cassie" Palmer is introduced as a powerful clairvoyant who has been on the run for three years from Antonio "Tony," a criminal vampire who raised her after her parents' death. It was Antonio's intention, as Cassie grew up, to use her increasing powers for his own purposes. As Antonio wished to keep the benefits of Cassie's powers to himself, he kept her isolated in his enclave. The only people Cassie got to see on a regular basis were her governess, Eugenie; Rafe, a servant vampire; and Mircea Basarab, Tony's master vampire. As well as the gift of clairvoyance, she is also able to talk to, and see, ghosts, some of whom she has made friends. One ghost in particular, Billy Joe, is her best friend. The story commences three years after her escape from Tony's clutches, after Cassie found out that he had her parents killed. |
Dreams of My Russian Summers | Andreï Makine | null | The book opens with the narrator leafing through photographs of relatives he doesn't know in his grandmother’s house in Saranza, a Russian town on the border of the steppe. His grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, comes in and starts talking about the photographs and her memories to the boy and his sister. The novel is characterized by stories like this: a collection of Charlotte’s memories and the narrator’s memories, intertwining so that the text moves seamlessly through their lives in a dreamlike fashion. The movement between Charlotte's French past and the Soviet present causes conflict in the boy's identity as the novel explores both sides of his heritage. Charlotte begins the novel by transporting her grandchildren to the French ‘Atlantis’ during the flooding of Paris in 1910. So begins the narrator’s desire to learn all about this mysterious French past. He describes the town of Saranza in-between these stories. It is a quiet town bordering the Russian steppe that is lined with the old izba, traditional Russian houses made of logs. The town is a strange mixture of these old relics and the new regime style that discards any excess or superfluous design, showcasing the theme of the clash between past and present. At the return of autumn, the boy narrator and his sister return to their hometown: and unnamed city on the banks of the Volga that is very industrial and Stalinist in its design. He quickly falls back into the pace of Russian life with its schooling and paramilitary exercise. The romantic image of the Tsar Nicholas II that his grandmother told him of and the image of “Nicholas the Bloody” taught in school confuse him over which story is the truth: the Russian or the French? The narration moves on to describe Charlotte’s early life. After the death of her husband, Norbert, Albertine becomes unstable and moves several times between Russia and France. It is the grave of her husband that keeps bringing her back to the Siberia town Boysark along with Charlotte. Young Charlotte, roughly age nine, begins to give French lessons to the Governor of Boysark's daughter. She becomes caretaker to her mother, who is revealed as a morphine addict. After several relapses, Albertine takes Charlotte with her back to France. But in July 1914, Albertine temporarily moves back to Siberia when Charlotte is eleven to put an end to her Siberian life. She never returns to France. Then war came and Charlotte’s only caretaker, her uncle Vincent, is killed in battle. Time jumps ahead to 1921 where Charlotte is chosen to go to Russia as a Red Cross nurse because she can speak both French and Russian. Years pass with only the description of wartime hardship and the images of the countless mutilated soldiers that fall under Charlotte’s care. Charlotte decides to return to the town of her childhood, Boysark, to see the fate of the izba where she and her mother once lived. She comes across an old grizzled woman living there only to find that it is her mother. When Charlotte tries to take her mother and leave Russia, the government of Boysark seizes her papers and refuses to return them. Mother and daughter barely survive through the winter living on dried plants. In May, fearing starvation, Albertine and Charlotte flee the town and begin working on a Siberian farm. Albertine dies two years later and soon after that Charlotte marries a Russian man named Fyodor and they settle in the town of Bukhara. Coming back to the present, the story moves into more of Charlotte’s dreamy stories of France through her “Siberian suitcase” filled with newspaper clippings. She talks of royalty, of President Félix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress, of restaurants, revolutions, etc. Back in his house, the narrator overhears his parents and other relatives talking of Charlotte. Because he is fourteen years old, they tolerate his presence as they plunge into the details of the arrest of Fyodor. Fyodor is dressed in the red outfit of Father Christmas to entertain his children on New Year's Eve when he is arrested. Although the reason is fuzzy, it is hinted at that the arrest is partially because of Charlotte’s “crime” of being French. Thus, Fyodor could be accused of being a French spy. He is away supposedly temporarily to be re initiated into the Party, however the next time he sees Charlotte is in four years, after the war. A short time after Fyodor’s arrest, Germans bomb the city where Charlotte and her son and daughter are living. They leave the house and escape to the railway, running away from the explosions and debris of the city. As Charlotte begins to fall asleep on the last train out of the city, she realizes that she brought the “Siberian suitcase” rather than the suitcase of warm clothes and food she had packed that morning. By chance, this suitcase becomes the last physical link between Charlotte and her life in France. She and the children settle in a town 100 km away from the destroyed city where she works again as a nurse, caring for the wounded soldiers fourteen hours a day. In the midst of this constant presence of dying soldiers, Charlotte receives word of Fyodor’s death on the front. Soon after she receives a second note of death, and begins to hope that her husband is alive. Fyodor indeed returns to Saranza after Japan was defeated in September 1945. Less than a year later, he dies of his wounds. After returning from Saranza, the young narrator searches hungrily for all the information in his city about France. His obsession with France and the past alienates him from his classmates, making him a loner. After being taunted and teased by his peers, he meets another loner nicknamed Pashka, and the two become friends only on the basis that they understand each other’s isolation. The next summer, the narrator returns alone to Saranza because his sister is studying in Moscow. His fifteenth year marks the start of the deterioration of the relationship between him and Charlotte. He is no longer an innocent youth and longs to return to feeling the “magic” of Charlotte’s stories that he did when he was young. He becomes angry at Charlotte’s retelling of the past, confused between this past and the harsh Russia he lives in. At the very end of August, only a few days before his departure from Saranza, he mends his bond with Charlotte. All of a sudden he realized the beauty of this French past, and he and Charlotte understand each other again. Back in his hometown situated by the Volga, the narrator’s mother goes to the hospital for some tests. The narrator is reveling in the freedom of his mother’s absence when he overhears a classmate saying that his mother is dead. In February, only months after his mother dies, his father Nikolai dies of a heart attack. It is not his parents’ deaths but his aunt’s arrival that changes his outlook on life. His aunt is a tough, no-nonsense, resourceful woman who shoes him to love Russia. Through her, he sees the harshness, the violence, and the darkness of Russia, yet he loves it still. As he says on page 144, “The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became.” As he moves closer to his Russian heritage, he pushes away the French. After the now fifteen-year old narrator accepts and loves Russia, he immediately becomes accepted by the peers that once scorned him. In fact, his “Frenchness” turns into a gift. He entertains his classmates with all the information he has learned about France, which makes him no longer a loner but alienates him from Pashka. In the cruel world of teenagers, he openly scorns Pashka to become accepted. It is on the Mountain of Joy, the mountain hideaway where all the teenagers go to dance and flirt, that the narrator has his first romantic encounter, his first experience of “physical love.” It is a very awkward encounter, and he is humiliated afterward when his classmates make fun of him for not knowing “how to make love” on page 170. It seems to the narrator that his “French implant” has made him an outcast, even among women. Without warning he takes a train to Saranza to put an end to this French nuisance. On the way to Saranza, the boy thinks of all the things he will yell at Charlotte for. He feels like his French sensibility has “split reality in two” (Makine, 174). But when he abruptly arrives, she is calm and acts undisturbed. While the narrator is leaning on the balcony, Charlotte leans beside him and starts talking of some of the things she saw during the war. They begin to walk out far past the town and end up at the Sumra, a small stream several miles away from Saranza. She addressed the narrator as “Alyosha” and tells him that even after all of her years in Russia, she still can’t seem to understand her adopted country; its harshness still seems foreign. Yet at the same time, she understands it more than the Russians, for she has seen the solitude of that country and its people. As the narrator walks back to Saranza with his grandmother, he feels as though the Russian and French within him now live in peace, put to rest by Charlotte's words. Charlotte and her grandson spend their last summer together in peace. They walk down to the banks of the Sumra every day and read underneath the shade, speaking in French, talking about everything. Charlotte tells him about when she was raped in her youth. She was in the desert when a young Uzbek man forced her down. When the rape was over, he tried to shoot her in the head, but it only grazed her temple. Left to die out in the desert, she explains to the narrator that is was a saiga, a desert antelope, which saved her. After following the saiga, she slept pressed up against it at night, and its body heat saved her from the desert cold. The next morning she wandered until she found a lake, where unknown travelers found her the next day. It was the rape that produced the narrator’s Uncle Sergei, but Charlotte explains that she and Fyodor loved and accepted him as their first born son. The rest of the summer passes like this until suddenly the narrator jumps ahead to ten years in the future. He is twenty-five and has not seen Charlotte since that last summer of his fifteenth year. He is about to study abroad to Europe and is telling Charlotte that she should come along to France with him. Despite France meaning the world to her, she calmly refuses. It is then, that the narrator understands “what France meant to her” (Makine, 204) Now it is twenty years past his summer in Saranza, and the narrator is roughly thirty-five. His career as a radio broadcaster in a German city is over, and he begins to wander aimlessly throughout Europe. As soon as he becomes used to the routine of a place: its sights, smells, and sounds, he leaves immediately. He begins to have fleeting thoughts of suicide, accepting it as a way out of routine. Amidst this mental distress he settles in a small apartment in Paris. It is unclear what happens in Paris, however he comes down with a fever and drifts in and out of reality, eventually making a temporary home inside a family tomb in a cemetery. After feverishly wondering like a madman in Paris, he collapses by the river and sees a plaque inscribes with the words “Flood Level. January 1910.” (Makine, 214) This plaque brings back a flood of memories of France and his Russian summers. But most importantly, it reminds him of Charlotte, his French grandmother. He is struck by the desire to write and begins writing a book titled Charlotte Lemonnier: Biographical Notes. The narrator begins to live on the hope of publishing this book and bringing Charlotte back to France. Three years later, his books are published; he has several of them in the nearby bookstore. His first books sit unsold in the corner shelf because he wrote them in French, which the critics rejected as a Russian man attempting to use their language. However, once he wrote in Russian and had them translated into French, the critics hailed his novels. Thus, the narrator has written himself out of poverty and is prepared to find Charlotte to bring her back to France. In order to accomplish this he hires Alex Bond, a Russian businessman, to travel to Saranza and see if Charlotte is even alive. Mr. Bond returns and tells him that his grandmother is alive and well. The only thing preventing him from traveling from Russia is his lack of a French passport. As soon as he submits his name for approval of a passport, he decides that in order to welcome Charlotte to France he must decorate his apartment with antiques that might make her feel more at home. He moves into a larger apartment imagining her surprise at the lovely view, and buys her books that may remind her of the Paris of the past. Soon he has overspent his income, yet he still decorates Charlotte’s future room in anticipation of her arrival. It is in the final days before he plans to leave for Saranza when the narrator receives a letter from the Prefecture de Police. The letter states that his request is unacceptable. He writes for an appeal, but the months slip by until it is August. By this time it has been a year since Alex Bond's trip to Saranza. A man named Val Grig travels to Paris to deliver a package to the narrator. He informs him that Charlotte Lemonnier has died, on September 9 of the previous year. His grandmother died only a few short weeks after Alex Bond had traveled to Saranza, making everything that the narrator did, everything he bought was in vain. Without knowing what else to do, the narrator opens the envelope that Charlotte intended for him. He sadly realizes that it was not the rejection of the passport that annulled his reunion with Charlotte, it was time. He begins reading the envelope, which is a manuscript written in Charlotte’s hand. It is a story he finds to be all too common: that of a woman of the Stalinist period who was accused of propaganda and placed in a woman’s camp. The woman is with child and her life is therefore saved. However, when the child is very young she is crushed by a tractor and dies in a hospital where Charlotte received permission to see her. Then, confused, the narrator reads the last sentence. Charlotte writes to him that this woman was his mother, Maria Stepanovna Dolina. This woman, the narrator’s biological mother, wanted to keep this secret from him for as long as possible. In two days time the narrator leaves his apartment, his payment being all of the items he had bought for Charlotte's room, still uninhabited. As he walks through the dusty Paris streets he thinks of another memory to add to his Notes. It is that of him and Charlotte wandering through a forest decorated with rusting weaponry. In the middle of a clearing grew a grapevine, which caused Charlotte unimaginable joy; it was a reminder of her France. The novel ends with the narrator looking at the picture of his real mother that Charlotte gave him. He tells himself that he must get used to the idea of her as his mother. His thoughts drift to Charlotte’s presence filling the streets of Paris as he searches for the words to tell her story. |
Le Fait du prince | Amélie Nothomb | 2,008 | A man steals an unknown person's identity. «There is a moment, between fifteenth and sixteenth sip of champagne, where every man is an aristocrat». es:Ordeno y mando fr:Le Fait du prince |
My Darling, My Hamburger | Paul Zindel | 1,969 | As part one begins, the reader meets the story’s protagonist, Maggie Tobin. She is walking though the auditorium with her best friend Liz Carstensen. The two settle down into their seats while Pierre Jefferson, the grade president begins to speak. During the assembly, Maggie points out Sean Collins, the boy who Liz is currently seeing. Next to Sean is a scrawny boy by the name of Dennis Holowitz. Maggie thinks Dennis looks weird but eventually agrees to go on a date with him, Liz, and Sean. The date is atrocious, as Maggie hates both the movie and her company. Despite this, Maggie agrees to go on another date with Dennis. While on this double date, Liz and Sean travel down to the ocean to spend some intimate time together. Just as everything is becoming “heated up,” Liz backs away. It becomes apparent that the two constantly fight over sexual issues. Back in the car, Dennis moves closer and closer to Maggie, eventually beginning to make out with her. In order prevent the situation from heating up any further, a panicked Maggie recommends that the two go and get a hamburger. Not too long after their second date, Maggie is forced to break off a date with Dennis because Liz and Sean are in a fight. That night, Maggie and Liz set out for the Red Pub Inn. On the way, they are given a lift by Rod Gittens, an older boy who has dashingly good looks but a very poor reputation. While at the Red Pub Inn, Liz writes Sean a letter on the back of a place setting. She declares her love for him and speaks of how she needs him in her life. The letter is dropped off in Sean’s mailbox and Liz waits for a response. When Liz does not hear back from Sean, she decides to go to the winter dance with Rod Gittens. While at the dance, it becomes apparent that Liz is using Rod to try and get back at Sean for not responding to her letter. By the end of the night, Rod has Liz in a room alone, ready to rape her. The quick work of Maggie saves Liz from catastrophe as Sean is alerted about Rod and rushes over to the dance. Liz learns that Sean never received her letter and the two leave the dance together. Shortly after the dance, the reader learns that Liz is pregnant with Sean’s baby. Liz appeals to Maggie for help and states that she does not have enough money to pay for an abortion. Eventually, Liz tells Sean about the baby and the two decide to get married and move to California for a few years. Liz is elated but Sean is a little distressed with the situation. Sean asks his father for advice about “a friend” who got a girl pregnant. The reader learns that Sean’s father is a conservative man who likes his alcohol. Sean’s father tells his son that the “friend,” should get the girl out of his life as soon as possible. It is explained that the young man would likely be giving up his life if he kept his connections with the girl. Upon hearing this news, Sean realizes that he has too much ahead of him in life and decides to break everything off with Liz. Soon after Sean’s realization, he gives Liz $300 and tells her that they can no longer be together. A deeply saddened Liz is forced to miss out on her prom as she travels with Maggie and Rod to a doctor who can perform her abortion. When Liz finishes with doctor, she appears to be comfortable and in good spirits. Despite this positive sign, as the girls arrive at Liz’ house, Maggie realizes that her friend is bleeding and in grave condition. Maggie is deeply frightened by this and runs into Liz’ house to get her mother. At graduation, it's revealed that Liz will not be graduating with the rest of her class. Maggie has called Liz’s house numerous times in an attempt to speak with her but is told by Liz's mother that Liz never wishes to speak with her again. At graduation, Maggie contemplates the important milestone she is experiencing. She realizes that one’s present soon becomes their past. This past then stays with the person for the rest of their life. On this note, Maggie finds Dennis, wishes him the best of luck in life, and gives him a goodbye kiss. GSM |
Choke Creek | null | null | Fifteen-year-old Evie Glauber is the great great-granddaughter of the man who founded the Rocky Mountain Sun. Her father, Jase Glauber, expects Evie to take over The Sun when she grows up, but all Evie likes to do is ride horses. One day she rides out to a ranch where she meets Eason Swale, the great-grandson of a cavalryman who fought in the famous Battle of Choke Creek. Eason becomes a soldier and goes off to fight in the Vietnam War. But Evie becomes increasingly convinced that there is more to the story of the Battle of Choke Creek than people say. As she struggles to uncover the truth, she discovers the past haunting her. And when Eason comes home unexpectedly from the war, Evie realizes that the key to saving him is to find out what really happened at Choke Creek. Choke Creek is based on the Sand Creek Massacre, which took place in Southeastern Colorado in 1864. Small's novel contains real documents from the era, including letters written by cavalrymen who witnessed the massacre and contemporary newspaper accounts. |
Aladore | Henry Newbolt | null | The story takes the form of a quest exploring in allegorical fashion the qualities of youth, duty, self and heritage. Ywain, a knight bored with his administrative duties, abandons his estate to his younger brother and goes on a pilgrimage to seek his heart's desire. Following a will-o'-the-wisp resembling a child, he is led to a hermit dwelling in the wilderness, under whose instruction he lives for a time. Afterwards his quest takes him to the city of Paladore (also the subject of a separate poem by Newbolt) and the lady Aithne, half-fae enchantress and daughter to Sir Ogier of Kerioc and the Sidhe-descended Lady Ailinn of Ireland, whom he woos and encounters on various occasions. In the course of his adventures he intervenes in the strife of the two warring Companies of the Tower and of the Eagle, afterward feasting with both in Paladore; he undertakes the Three Adventures, of the Chess, the Castle of Maidens, and the Howling Beast; visits the City of the Saints and the Lost Lands of the South; sojourns with Fauns; and has a vision of Paladore’s counterpart, the city of Aladore, which he afterwards seeks. After revisiting the hermit and Paladore, he achieves his objective, and he and Aithne are wed there. In a subsequent return to Paladore Ywain finds he has wearied of it, is mishandled by the Great Ones of the city, and is “excommunicate after the Custom of Paladore.” Wondering at the likeness and contrast of the two cities, he and Aithne wonder which is the more enduring, and test the question by building two sand castles on the shore. Ywain’s, built with his hands as a stand-in for Paladore, is swept away by the tide, while Aithne’s, created from a song in representation of Aladore, is preserved. They then return to the mortal city, and appear to perish in a final battle. |
Breaking and Entering | H. R. F. Keating | null | Ghote reflects on his misfortune in being assigned to a case of burglary instead of the murder of Anil Ajmani. By chance he encounters Axel Svensson, once an analyst for UNESCO who worked with Ghote in The Perfect Murder. Ghote immediately feels sorry for Axel, who is visiting India after the death of his wife. Ghote agrees, against his better judgement, to let Axel assist in his investigation. The next day Ghote rejoins Axel to learn the big Swedish man has been frightened by the urban legend of "The Kidney Heist". Together they visit and interview a victim of the cat burglar "Yeshwant". Axel is surprised by the deferential treatment Ghote gives to the victim and comments afterward that a witness would be handled differently in Sweden. The two argue. Later they meet Pinkie, the journalist who gave the cat burglar the nickname "Yeshwant", who is keen to get new information from Ghote. With Pinkie's assistance they interview a witness who is reluctant to let them look for clues in her bedroom. When they leave, Ghote wonders whether all the stolen jewellery came from "Pappubhai Chimanlal and Company". Ghote interviews the brother of the last victim, who owns a shop called Video Valley. Ghote concludes the man, while in financial trouble, is not in league with the cat burglar. Next Ghote interviews Mrs Masbahn, who had a diamond ring stolen. Mrs Masbahn says she bought the ring from Karamdas and Sons, at the urging of her lover, a drunken poet named Bottlewalla. Bottlewalla, however, remembers things differently. The couple quarrelled over where to buy the ring, with her favouring Karamdas and Sons and he Pappubhai Chimanlal and Company. Bottlewalla insists the ring was bought from Pappubhai Chimanlal. Mr Pappubhai Chimanlal is polite but does not allow Ghote to interview his employees, referring to his extensive staff vetting procedures and staff moral. Axel is furious with this lack of assistance. Mr Chimanlal tells them his secretary, Miss Cooper, is the only member of staff beside himself who knows the details of every transaction to take place in the store. Ghote presses to interview Miss Cooper but, in Axel's absence, Mr Chimanlal confides that Miss Cooper is a lonely, loveless woman, and to ensure her complete loyalty he seduced once her many years ago. Undeterred, Ghote and Axel seek out Miss Cooper. She denies providing information to the cat burglar. Ghote presses her but she continues to protest her innocence and eventually, Ghote relents and accepts her innocence. Outside, Axel deduces the only other person out who might know all the transactions carried out at the jewellers is Mr Pappubhai Chimanlal's wife. At interview Mrs Chimanlal tells them the Indian folk story of the sparrow and crow. The sparrow builds a nest of wax and the crow builds a nest of dung. The rains come and wash away the crow's nest. The crow begs the sparrow for shelter. When the crow insists on being let in, the sparrow admits the crow to her home, and invites the crow to dry herself on the stove. The crow does so and is burnt to death. This is Mrs Chimanlal's way of warning the detectives that her husband has influence and she can make life difficult for them. Ghote realises that she is wearing a necklace very like one described in the list of stolen items. He persuades Mrs Chimanlal to swing back on the swing seat she is sitting on and Axel takes a photo. As she does Ghote sees the necklace clearly and realises it is indeed stolen property. Ghote accuses her of being Yeshwant. Mrs Chimanlal admits she is Yeshwant, saying it was such fun to commit the crimes. Bartering for her freedom, she tells what she knows of Anil Ajmani's residence, which she surveyed for a robbery that never took place. Mrs Chimanlal promises that she will never again climb as Yeshwant and will return all the stolen items. Ghote is forced to content himself with this, as Mrs Chimanlal's money and political influence means Ghote cannot convict her. Ghote also instructs Yeshwant to anonymously call Pinkie Dinkarrao the journalist and provide a tip that the Yeshwant is out of business. Investigating the murder of Anil Ajmani without orders, Ghote requests Pinkie's assistance in trailing Mr Masters, the chief of security. Later Ghote realises that Ajmani's daughter is Mrs Patel, one of the victims of Veshwant. The next day Ghote finds Axel distraught after being tricked into parting with a large amount of money when a local lured him to the funeral of a local child. Together they go to interview Mr Masters, only to find that Pinkie has arrived first and accidentally alerted him, who has taken all his property and vacated his secret hideaway. Pinkie is unharmed, though shaken, and Ghote and Axel put her in a taxi and bid her goodbye. At a nearby restaurant Ghote extracts information from the owner, who says Masters claimed he was going to Andari. Ghote and Axel visit Ivy Cooper, whose father they hope may have information about a club they believe Masters belongs to. They find her embroiled in an argument with a neighbour over a clogged drain. Ghote is forced to repair the drain to restore calm before he can ask his questions. Miss Cooper's father returns and Ghote questions him to see what he knows about Mr Victor Masters. The old man identifies Victor Masters as Victor Hinks, who was sacked from the railway and denied membership to the retired rail workers club. Miss Cooper knows that Victor Hinks left his wife and children, who live near the railway station. The nearby school gives Ghote the family's address after some resistance. By interviewing Mrs Hinks Ghote learns that Victor's brother, Vincent Hinks, had a romantic attachment to Anil Ajmani's daughter. Anil Ajmani ordered Vincent's murder because of this. Ghote deduces that (unknown to Mrs Hinks) Victor Hinks took the alias of Victor Masters and became Ajmani's head of security so he could murder Ajmani in revenge for Vincent's death. Ghote presents his findings to the Deputy Commissioner, who is at first incredulous. Ghote suggests that they arrest Victor when he collects his last pay cheque from his job as Security Chief. The Deputy Commissioner leaves to make the arrest, promising Ghote a more important case as a reward. |
Pages Stained With Blood | Mamoni Raisom Goswami | null | The story follows a young Assamese woman who teaches at the University of Delhi and is an author. She is busy writing a book on Delhi and regularly jots down anything that crosses her mind. The Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple in Amritsar brings sudden twist to the novel and the protagonist plunges headlong into the crisis for most of the people she is close to are Sikhs. At last, her book is drenched in Santokh Singh's blood and she loses all her recorded material. |
The Man from Chinnamasta | Mamoni Raisom Goswami | null | The novel follows the relationship of Dorothy Brown, a British woman in Assam, and her relationship with a tantric of the Kamakhya Temple in Assam. Ratnadhar and Bidhibala's -the child widow's- story runs parallel to this narrative. Ratnadhar organizes a signature campaign against the practice and faces many troubles in the process. |
Executive Power | Vince Flynn | null | CIA field agent Mitch Rapp's cover has been blown following his last assignment, preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons. Rapp receives public acknowledgment by the president in response to the latest Congressional leak to the media. Though the praise is of the highest quality, the President might as well have placed a bulls-eye on Rapp's chest and that of his loved ones by singling him out as the most important person in the fight to counter terrorism. The spotlight makes the former covert operator an ideal international target for eradication by terrorists as the symbol he has become. Rapp moves from CIA operative duties to that of a counter-terrorism bureaucrat. As special advisor on counter-terrorism to CIA director Dr. Irene Kennedy, Rapp uncomfortably sits in an office. However, everything changes when radical Islamic terrorists ambush Navy SEALS on a top-secret rescue mission in the Philippines. The leak had to be in either the State Department or the Philippine diplomatic corps, but nobody knows for sure. However, worse yet is that someone is trying to cause a Jihad on a scale never before seen and that unknown invisible individual is close to achieving the goal with only a too visible Rapp in the way. Rapp leads a team to avenge that loss by defeating the Philippine terrorist network that killed two SEAL team members and rescuing the American hostages. In order to successfully accomplish this mission he must keep its existence from the turncoats who betrayed those who went before him. The coincidental plot-line has forces plotting to upset the tenuous balance in the Middle East's geopolitical situation. A flamboyant Saudi Prince, who is banished from the Kingdom, elicits the help of a Palestinian assassin to murder the leaders of Islamic terrorist cells as well as Saudi and Palestinian Ambassadors in the hopes of dissolving US support for Israel and the eventual establishment of an official Palestinian state. |
The Necromancer: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel | Michael Scott | null | Nicholas Flamel,Pernelle Flamel, Sophie, and Josh return to San Francisco. The Flamels go to their book store while Josh and Sophie head for their Aunt Agnes' house. When they approach they see a limousine waiting outside and a stranger talking to their Aunt. They approach with caution but in the following scuffle on the doorstep Sophie is dragged into the car by a female looking exactly like their lost friend Scathach, but who is in fact her twin, Aoife. Josh races to the book store to alert Nicholas and Perry and together, they set out to rescue Sophie who has been taken to a houseboat in Sausalito owned by Aoife's companion, the Japanese immortal, Niten. Dr. Dee has been declared utlaga (a wanted man) for his failure to capture the missing pages of the Codex by his Dark Elder masters. Not wanting to experience their wrath, he flees. He makes his way across England from Salisbury Plain to his London office with the last two legendary swords, now fused together, in his possession. Once in London he enlists the help of an old acquaintance, Virginia Dare, and after an encounter with some cucubuth bounty hunters the pair escape to Dee's home in San Francisco, where he prepares to call back the Archon Coatlicue -Mother of the Gods- to help him with his plans to conquer planet Earth and take revenge on The Dark Elders that outlawed him. Joan of Arc and Scathach are joined in their exile by William Shakespeare, Palamedes and the Comte de Saint-Germain after they seek out Lord Tammuz's help. Shortly after they are re-united they are joined by the mysterious, hooded, hook-handed man who tells them that he has a pre-destined mission for them. He takes them through Xibalba and several other shadow realms to the Earth ten thousands over years ago, when Danu Talis still existed and they have to fight in the battle that meant its downfall. Niccolò Machiavelli and Billy the Kid get off the monster filled Alcatraz Island with the help of Billy's Dark Elder Master who sends the immortal Black Hawk to retrieve them and bring them both back to his house. After a fraught meeting with Billy's master they count themselves lucky to be alive as they had failed to accomplish the missions given to them by their masters: to kill Perenelle and loose the monsters trapped on the island onto San Francisco. The pair set out to return to Alcatraz and make amends by achieving what they were tasked with doing. After their initially tense meeting, Aoife, Niten, Josh, Sophie, Nicholas, and Perenelle agree to travel to Point Reyes so that Josh can be taught the magic of fire by Prometheus, the Master of Fire. Josh is separated from the others shortly after learning the magic of fire and finds himself walking into Dee's home, Sophie wakes up and realizes that Josh is missing. After alerting the others about his disappearance they track Josh to Dee's home. Sophie, Aoife and Niten race to stop him from unwittingly helping Dee complete his plan to summon the fearsome Coatlicue who Dee plans to turn loose on the Dark Elders, while Nicholas and Perenelle stay with Prometheus, following what they do. Josh, still under enchantment, turns against his sister and escapes with Dr. Dee and Virginia Dare, while Aoife pushes Coatlicue back into the shadowrealm it came from, but leaving herself trapped with it. This leaves the end of the book on a cliff hanger. The Flamels are very weak, the twins are divided, and the Dark Elders are gathering in anticipation of the Final Summoning at Litha, when they hope to return to power and dominate the world. |
SuperFreakonomics | Steven D. Levitt | 2,009 | The explanatory note states that the theme of the book explores the concept that we all work for a particular reward. The introduction states we should look at problems economically. The examples given include the preference for sons in India and the hardships Indian women face, as well as the horse manure issue at the turn of the 20th century. The first chapter explores prostitution and pimps in South Chicago, one high class escort, and real estate brokers. The pimps and brokers are compared based on the idea that they are helping to sell one's services to the larger market. Inequalities in pay grades for men and women are also covered in the chapter. The second chapter is about patterns and details. Patterns in the ages of soccer players, health issues of children in the womb during Ramadan, and the upbringings of terrorists are observed. Next, the book discusses the skills of hospital doctors and how Azyxxi was created, and draws parallels to how terrorists in the UK were tracked down by banks. Altruism is discussed in the third chapter, and uses examples of the murder of Kitty Genovese, crime rates as affected by television, and economic experimental games such as Prisoner's dilemma, Ultimatum, and the work of John A. List. The fourth chapter is about unintended consequences and simple fixes. It goes into detail about Ignaz Semmelweis' work in hospitals, use of seatbelts and child seats, and the possibility of reducing hurricanes. The fifth chapter discusses externalities and global warming. It discusses how economics does not necessarily take environmental issues into account. Further, the authors posit an alternative way of solving global warming by adding sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere. The epilogue is about microeconomics, and discusses a study as to whether or not monkeys can be trained to use money. |
Olivia | null | 1,997 | Olivia's parents are separated. Her father has a mistress, Rosalie, with who he lives now. Olivia's mother is upset because of it, but she doesn't want her husband to come back. At school, Olivia has a problem, because she was chosen to organise a school theatre. She doesn't like the idea and she tells the headmaster that she won't face the challenge. The same thing does Luke - Poppy's boyfriend. Once, Hayley, Livi's friend, invites her to the Stomping Ground night club. Before this, she goes to a dinner with her father and Rosalie. Livi changes her opinion about Rosalie, because she realises that she can have problems, too (Rosalie's mother makes problems, because she's got Alzheimer's disease). Once, while coming back from school, Olivia meets Ryan - a handsome boy, who lives with his mother on a boat in summer. She meets him at Stomping Ground, where they dance together. Livi starts to fall in love with him. But she can't invite him to come to her house, because her mother gets a new person to live with them - Leonora. Olivia doesn't like her, but few weeks later, Ryan tells her that Leo is his aunt. Some time later, Ryan invites his mother to go with him to Olivia's. Livi finds out that, Ryan is her elder brother. She's disappointed, but she falls in love with another boy from her school. Livi's parents are going to get divorced. |
The 50th Law | Robert Greene | 2,009 | The central theme of the book is fearlessness. The back cover says nihil timendum est, meaning nothing is to be feared. Each of the 10 chapters in the book explains a factor of fearlessness and begins by telling how 50 learned this Fearless Philosophy in Southside Queens. The 50th Law illustrates universal laws by supplementing anecdotes from 50's life with historical examples from Malcolm X, Miles Davis, Sun Tzu, François de La Rochefoucauld, Machiavelli, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Thucydides, Dostoyevsky, Charlie Parker, and the Baron de Montesquieu. #See Things For What They Are (Intense Realism) #Make Everything Your Own (Self-Reliance) #Turn Shit Into Sugar (Opportunism) #Keep Moving (Calculated Momentum) #Know When To Be Bad (Aggression) #Lead From The Front (Authority) #Know Your Environment From The Inside Out (Connection) #Respect The Process (Mastery) #Push Beyond Your Limits (Self-Belief) #Confront Your Mortality (The Sublime) |
From Anna | Jean Little | 1,972 | In the mid 1930s in Germany, things are changing, people are moving away or disappearing. The new headmaster at the Solden's school forbids the singing of a song titled "My thoughts are free" (Die Gedanken sind frei) during an assembly, instead making the school sing the national anthem. Anna's father, disturbed by the changes in his country, promises Anna that she will be able to grow up in a place where her thoughts are free. When his brother Karl in Canada dies, leaving him his shop and the home he had purchased there, Ernst sees an opportunity to move to Canada. He announces to his family that they will be moving to Canada. The rest of the family comes on board slowly, but Anna, terrified, resists. In Germany she is nearly failing school, how will she manage in a new country and a new language? When they arrive in Toronto, they are greeted by a friend of their uncle's, Dr Schumacher, who helps them move in, and gives them check-ups before they start school. Anna is terrified to learn she will be starting school soon, but during her examination, a startling discovery is made; Anna can barely see. A prescription for glasses helps immensely, however even with the glasses, she has less than normal vision, and is put in a special multi-grade class for students with similar vision. Her teacher here is Miss Williams. Seeing the potential in Anna she sets out to slowly coach the girl out of her shell. She gives Anna A Child's Garden of Verses, and Anna discovers a love of reading. Her English improves with leaps and bounds, and soon she speaks only English at school and with the friends she has found there. However she continues to present her old prickly side to her family, remembering all the years when they didn't understand her. As the Solden's first Christmas in Canada approaches, the children are becoming more and more aware of the effects of the depression on their lives. Instead of keeping with tradition, and getting money from their parents to buy presents, the older children decide to come up with presents for their parents themselves. They struggle to include Anna, but in the end, decide she is "only a kid" and that their parents won't expect anything from her. At school the next day Anna is hurt and infuriated by this and she cannot keep her mood from her classmates. When she describes her problem to Miss Williams, a flood of similar stories come from her classmates. They all express a desire to give their parents a present that truly shows how much they are capable of. Miss Williams returns the next day with a plan. With money for supplies provided by her and Dr. Schumacher, the children are going to weave wastepaper baskets. Some children are dubious, but Anna takes to it right away, weaving a beautiful basket. On Christmas Eve, after her siblings have presented their gifts for Mama and Papa, Anna brings hers out. Her parents are amazed, and her siblings surprised, wondering how she could have made something so beautiful. Miss Williams and Dr Schumacher, invited by Anna to share in the family's celebrations, arrive. The novel closes with the whole group singing Silent Night, the children in English, and the adults (minus Miss Williams) in German. |
The Help | Kathryn Stockett | 2,009 | The Help is set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and told primarily from the first-person perspectives of three women: Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Aibileen is an African-American maid who cleans houses and cares for the young children of various white families. Her first job since her own 24-year-old son, Treelore, died from an accident on his job is tending the Leefolt household and caring for their toddler, Mae Mobley. Minny is Aibileen's confrontational friend who frequently tells her employers what she thinks of them, resulting in having been fired from nineteen jobs. Minny's most recent employer was Mrs. Walters, mother of Hilly Holbrook. Hilly is the social leader of the community, and head of the Junior League. She is the nemesis of all three main characters. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family whose cotton farm employs many African-Americans in the fields, as well as in the household. Skeeter has just finished college and comes home with dreams of becoming a writer. Her mother's dream is for Skeeter to get married. Skeeter frequently wonders about the sudden disappearance of Constantine, the maid who raised her. She had been writing to Skeeter while she was away at college and her last letter promised a surprise upon her homecoming. Skeeter's family tells her that Constantine abruptly quit, then went to live with relatives in Chicago. Skeeter does not believe that Constantine would just leave and continually pursues anyone she thinks has information about her to come forth, but no one will discuss the former maid. The life that Constantine led while being the help to the Phelan family leads Skeeter to the realization that her friends' maids are treated very differently from how the white employees are treated. She decides (with the assistance of a publisher) that she wants to reveal the truth about being a colored maid in Mississippi. Skeeter struggles to communicate with the maids and gain their trust. The dangers of undertaking writing a book about African-Americans speaking out in the South during the early '60s hover constantly over the three women. Racial issues of overcoming long-standing barriers in customs and laws are experienced by all of the characters. The lives and morals of Southern socialites are also explored. |
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India | null | 2,009 | Dalrymple's seventh book is about the lives of nine Indians, a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a lady from a middle-class family in Calcutta, a prison warden from Kerala, an illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan, and a devadasi among others, as seen during his Indian travels. The book explores the lives of nine such people, each of whom represent a different religious path in nine chapters. * The Nun's Tale: It's a story of a Jain Nun in the ancient pilgrimage town of Sravanabelagola, who after the death of her friend and co-Nun decides to take the ritual fast to death or 'Sallekhana' * The Dancer of Kannur: Story of Hari Das, a Dalit from Kerala, who works as a manual labourer during the weeks and a prison warder during the weekends for 9 months of the year.Only during the holy Theyyam season from December to February, he turns into a dancer possessed by Gods revered even by the high caste Brahmins. * The Daughter of Yellamma: Story of the Devadasi Rani bai from Belgaum,Karnataka who was dedicated by her parents at the age of 6. Of how one of the oldest professions of India has undergone changes and adaptations through centuries. And the story of Yellamma, the goddess who was rejected by all but gives strength to the Devadasi's. * The Singer of Epics: Story of Mohan Bhopa and his wife Batasi, the two of the last hereditary singers of a great Rajasthani medieval poem, The Epic of Pabuji. * The Red Fairy: Story of Lal Peri, a Hindu woman from the India state of Bihar who has made the Sufi Dargah of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Rural Sindh of Pakistan her home. Of the ongoing conflict of orthodox Islam with the more secular Sufism. * The Monks Tale: Story of Tashi Passang, originally from Tibet but now living in the Indian town of Dharamsala after the Chinese captured Tibet. Of how it was difficult for a Monk to take up arms with the Tibetian resistance against the Chinese attack. * The Maker of Idols: Story of Srikanda Stpaty, in the temple town of Swamimalai in Tamil Nadu who is the 23rd in the long hereditary line stretching back to the great bronze casters of the Chola empire. * The Lady Twilight: Story of Manisha Ma Bhairavi, who lives in the holy town of Tarapith in West Bengal and worships goddess Tara. Of the Tantric traditions in Tarapith and the practices of storing and drinking from Human skull. * The Song of the Blind Minstrel: Story of the wandering minstrels or Bauls, of Kanai Das and Debdas baul,of the singing Baul tradition and the annual baul festival at Kenduli in West Bengal. For the launch of the book in India some of the characters in the book performed for the audience, with one of character's Hari Das from Kerala leading the Theyyam troupe and Paban Das Baul from Bengal leading the Baul singers. |
The Shrinking Man | Richard Matheson | null | While on holiday, the protagonist (Scott Carey) is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray shortly after he accidentally ingests insecticide. The radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day. A few weeks later, Carey can no longer deny the truth: not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was and deduces, to his dismay, that his body will continue to shrink. The abnormal size decrease of his body initially brings teases and taunting from local youths, then causes friction in his marriage and family life, because he loses the respect his family has for him because of his diminishing physical stature. Ultimately, as the shrinking continues, it begins to threaten Carey's life as well; at seven inches tall, he has a battle with the family cat that drives him outdoors, where he is attacked by a swallow in his garden; the conflict drives him through a window into the cellar of his house. Although he survives on the cheese left over in a mousetrap for a while, his size is eventually reduced to less than half an inch, at which point he is forced to engage in a victorious battle with a black widow spider that towers over him. As Carey continues shrinking, he realizes that his original fear that he would shrink into non-existence is incorrect; that he will continue to shrink, but will not disappear as he originally feared, and utters his famous closing line: "If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence." |
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