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The Sky is Falling | Sidney Sheldon | 2,001 | The main character of this book is Dana Evans, an anchorwoman for the press, who was also featured, though not as a main character, in another Sidney Sheldon book, The Best Laid Plans. |
Bloodline | Sidney Sheldon | 1,977 | Roffe and Sons is a family firm, an international empire filled with desperate, cash-hungry family members. At its head was one of the wealthiest men in the world, a man who has just died in a mysterious accident and left his only daughter, Elizabeth, in control of the company. With this, her relatives hoped to be allowed to steal their stocks since the company's bylaws prevent it from becoming public until all shareholders agree to change that and Elizabeth's father. |
If Tomorrow Comes | Sidney Sheldon | 1,985 | Tracy Whitney, the protagonist of the story, is a young, beautiful,and intelligent woman working as a computer operator for a bank in Philadelphia. The story begins with a phone conversation between Tracy and her mother Doris Whitney, who lives in New Orleans and takes care of the business set up by her deceased husband. Tracy tells her mother about her planned marriage with a businessman, Charles Stanhope III. Doris commits suicide after the conversation and Tracy is notified about it by a Lieutenant of the New Orleans police department. Upon arriving at New Orleans, Tracy becomes aware of the circumstances that led to her mother's suicide. She learns that Joe Romano, the main assistant of New Orleans' mafia leader Anthony Orsatti, had framed her mother into a legal case relating to fraud—Doris didn't have the money to fight the case and decided to commit suicide. Tracy is filled with hatred for Romano, and naively decides to bring her mother's name in the clear by making Romano confess his misdeed. She purchases a gun, which she only intends to use to threaten Romano, and reaches Romano's house. Romano lets her in and offers her a drink, while she asks him to write out a confession letter. Romano refuses, snatches the gun and tries to rape Tracey. Tracy grabs the gun during the struggle and accidentally fires a shot at Romano. She is horrified, as she never intended to kill Romano. She calls for medical aid and then flees to the airport where she is arrested by two policemen. She learns that Romano was alive, only wounded by the shot. The plaintiff accuses her of attempted murder and stealing a costly painting from Romano's house. She is assigned an attorney named Perry Pope who, to her ignorance, works for the mafia. Pope convinces her to plead guilty in court before Judge Lawrence (who is also secretly a mafia man) and promises that she'll be given only a three-month prison sentence. She follows his advice, and realizes in court that it was all a setup by Orsatti and Romano to destroy her — Lawrence sentences her to 15 years of incarceration in Southern Louisiana Penitentiary for Women. Charles doesn't give her a chance to let her explain her version of the incident, and leaves her at her fate with his unborn child in her womb. Tracy enters a life of hardship, sexual harassment and violence at the penitentiary and vows revenge against all those who harmed her and her mother. The title of the novel itself is from a melodramatic quote in the novel, where Tracy vows to take her revenge tomorrow, if tomorrow comes: Eventually, she becomes the nanny for the prison warden's young daughter, a job that leads to her release from jail. After coming out, she cunningly sets up distrust among Romano, Perry Pope and Orsatti, and frames Judge Lawrence in Russia over spying charges, thus ruining Anthony Orsatti's empire. Desperate, unable to find a job as an ex-convict, she turns to a well-known New York City jewelry store owner (and fence) who helps her make some fast money in a jewel heist. Escaping with the goods, Tracy has an encounter with Jeff Stevens, a master con man. Stevens steals the jewels from Tracy, who realizes she's been had. She then cons Jeff, taking back her prize. Not long after, Tracy travels to England and is introduced to Gunther Hartog, a world-class fence for valuable stolen property. Thus begins her life as one of the world's cleverest criminals. Tracy pursues some brilliant con schemes filled with humor and ingenuity all over Europe — such as stealing jewelry from an actress on the Orient Express, valuable painting from a museum, reselling a gem to a jeweler for much higher than its worth, etc. The Interpol issues alerts all over Europe in search of - as they perceive it - a gang of con-women. Only Daniel Cooper, a plain-looking sociopath and insurance investigator, seems capable of matching Tracy's brilliance; although he never manages to catch her red-handed. In the end, after having collected enough money to live a luxurious life, Tracy and Jeff plan to marry and live together in Brazil as law-abiding citizens. Unusually, the book presents the nominal "villains" – Tracy and Jeff – as sympathetic and kind-hearted, while the pursuing detective, Cooper, is presented as almost psychotic; this could be a reversal of the classic "bloodhound detective" chasing a smart and elusive enemy, as in The Day of the Jackal. |
The Best Laid Plans | Sidney Sheldon | null | Oliver Russell, a man with a desire for power, is fated to rise to the highest office, that of President of the United States. Leslie Stewart, his betrayed fiancée, is a woman dedicated to the single purpose of bringing Oliver Russell to ruin. After amassing her own media empire and marshaling all her forces against him, she stands poised to destroy Russell on the eve of his most dazzling triumph. Thinking only of preventing Oliver from winning the Presidency for a second term, little does she know that she is about to fall into her own trap. When Oliver returns from Paris married to Jan, Leslie vows to avenge him. However she keeps her thoughts concealed. This makes Todd Davis, Jan's father, introduce her to one of his friends, who owns a newspaper. A brief introduction followed by marriage sees Leslie manage her husband's empire. With his falling health and subsequent death, Leslie becomes the sole owner of his properties. In spite of all the other businesses, Leslie takes an immense liking for the media empire, with which she intends to destroy Oliver. During this part, Dana Evans, who stars in Sheldon's other novel "Sky is Falling," appears as an inquisitive reporter who adopts a boy from war torn Sarajevo. In the meantime, Oliver becomes the president, but during his first term there occur a series of deaths, all due to toxicity of Liquid Ecstasy, a dangerous aphrodisiac that Leslie connects to him. When she is convinced it is Oliver who is behind these murders, she goes on to publish the news of his arrest before it is confirmed. Dana Evans then unmasks the real culprit, while the president reveals a shocking secret. The book ends with the proposal of a peace pact, brokered by President Russell, among the Arab nations, while Leslie is left wondering if she has gone a bit too far. |
Morning, Noon and Night | Sidney Sheldon | 1,995 | Harry Stanford is a rich businessman. While travelling on his yacht, he mysteriously falls overboard owing to a storm, leaving his entire fortune, estimated to be around six to seven billion dollars to his three children-Tyler, a circuit court judge, Kendall a successful fashion designer and Woodrow. |
Master of the Game | Sidney Sheldon | 1,982 | The story begins with Kate Blackwell's ninetieth birthday celebrations in 1982 and is told in flashback. The story then moves one hundred years back to the arrival of Scotsman Jamie MacGregor (1865–1894) in Klipdrift, South Africa in 1883 to seek his fortune. He is soon defrauded by a wealthy Dutch storekeeper, Salomon Van Der Merwe, who steals his diamonds and leaves him in the desert to die. Jamie is rescued and taken to Cape Town by van der Merwe's Bantu servant Banda. Jamie plans his revenge, joined by Banda, who seeks vengeance for his younger sister who was raped and killed by Salomon. The two sneak into van der Merwe's heavily guarded diamond mines in the Namib Desert and succeed in stealing a load of diamonds worth a fortune. Jamie, now rugged and unrecognizable, returns to Klipdrift, cons Salomon into believing him to be a rich businessman and violates his daughter Margaret who gradually falls in love with him. However, when Jamie learns that Margaret is pregnant by him, he refuses to marry her and reveals to Salomon his true identity. The violation of Margaret's chastity becomes the talk of the town and Salomon plunges into depression and starts drinking; he soon commits suicide, an unhappy man. Jamie, initially, despises Margaret, but when she gives birth to a son, Jamie develops extreme fondness of his son and consents to marrying Margaret for the sake of their young son, Jamie, Jr. (1886–1893). Jamie creates a company called Kruger Brent (named after two guards who were calling each other in the diamond field) and pours all his attention into the business. At one point, after Kruger-Brent takes over the diamond mines, a young American named David Blackwell attempts to rob the mines in exactly the same way as Jamie and Banda did, but is caught by the guards. Jamie, feeling sympathy for Blackwell, gives him a job in the company. Jamie likes his determination and he works his way through the ranks becoming a Kruger-Brent executive. Banda, meanwhile, reunites with Jamie and informs him that he is using his share of the diamond fortune to discreetly fight against the government for Bantu rights. Over the years, Jamie finally abandons his vendetta, but never really loves Margaret. Instead, he falls for a young prostitute also named Margaret. He comes home one night drunk, and mistakes his wife for his favorite prostitute, and they make love. In 1892, Jamie and Margaret have a daughter Kate. A year later, Jamie, Jr. is mistakenly murdered in a Bantu uprising led by Banda, causing Jamie to have a stroke from which he later dies. Margaret takes over Kruger Brent to secure Kate's future and hires Blackwell to aid her. Kate grows up beautiful, strong-willed and manipulative. Having fallen in love with David Blackwell, who is 22 years older to her, as a teenager she is determined to marry him, and thwarts his engagement by buying the company owned by his fiancee's father. Kate and David later get married, move to NY and then David enlists in the army during World War I and is away for four years. He then returns home safe and later Kate becomes pregnant, but when she is seven months pregnant David is killed in a mine explosion, causing her to go into premature labor and give birth to a son, Anthony "Tony" James Blackwell (b. 1924). Like her father before her, Kate pours her life into Kruger Brent with passion, making it a global conglomerate. She naturally expects Tony to take over Kruger Brent, but Tony is more interested in becoming an artist. While he clearly has the potential to become a world-class artist, Kate secretly destroys Tony's career by paying a notable French critic to give negative comments on Tony's work because Kate strongly believes he is wasting his life as an artist and that there were "tens and thousands of painters in the world and my son was not meant to be one among them". Kate feels sad about Tony's disappointment and unhappiness but is determined to get him out of it. Kate later manipulates him into marrying Marianne Hoffmann, whose father owns a scientific patent she covets. The marriage is happy, but Marianne is told by a doctor that pregnancy is out of the question as she would be at risk for a stroke. When she tells Kate who is now a good friend of hers this, Kate is in denial about Marianne's condition and tells her that doctors could be wrong and to go ahead with a pregnancy. In 1950, Marianne becomes pregnant, but when she is taken to the hospital to give birth her blood pressure goes out of control and she has a stroke. An emergency Caesarian section is performed and twin girls are delivered, but Marianne dies before the second girl is delivered. Her doctor tells Tony that he had warned Marianne of the dangers but that Kate told her to ignore them. The incident, along with the coincidental revelation that Kate manipulated and ultimately destroyed his entire art career, drives Tony mad and he tries to kill his mother in revenge. She survives the gunshot wound, but Tony is committed to an institution. Kate is heart broken that her son felt this way about her but she is determined to survive. Kate takes in her two identical looking granddaughters, whom she names Eve and Alexandra, to raise. Eve, ruthless and cunning, sees Alexandra as an interloper and repeatedly attempts to kill her starting when they are young children, taking advantage of their identical looks. Alexandra is thought to be clumsy and accident-prone as they grow up and Kate clearly favors Eve as the heir apparent to Kruger Brent, but when Eve tries to implicate Alexandra in a sex scandal Kate realizes the truth about Eve and disinherits her, giving her only a small allowance and pays attention to Alexandra. She also does not tell Alexandra the truth about Eve but tells her that "Eve chose her own life". Enraged, Eve plots revenge against both her sister and grandmother. She meets George Mellis, the black sheep of a wealthy Greek family, and seduces him into helping her. Mellis is handsome and cultured, but he is also a violent sadist and homosexual. Eve, knowing this, holds it over his head as she reveals her scheme—to get Alexandra to fall in love with and marry him, after which he will murder her and cause Kate to die of grief. Cued by Eve, Mellis woos Alexandra by being the perfect man who loves all the things she loves, and Alexandra does fall madly in love with him and they marry. Eve continues to taunt Mellis, and one night he snaps and attacks Eve, brutally assaulting her. She eventually recovers thanks to the work of a talented but mousy plastic surgeon Keith Webster and uses the beating to get back into her grandmother's good graces. Kate melts and takes Eve back in and puts her back in the will, making Mellis superfluous. Eve changes tactics, fakes a scar, and begins visiting a psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Templeton pretending to be a depressed, suicidal Alexandra; the plan is that Mellis will take Alexandra out on a yacht where he will throw her overboard and make it appear as if she killed herself. When Mellis gets on the boat with whom he believes to be Alexandra, he instead finds Eve, who stabs him to death. In the course of the investigation Eve's plastic surgeon, Dr. Keith Webster, overhears a remark about the scar on Eve's head. Having fallen in love with her, he goes to her and reminds her that he left no scar and knows that she killed Mellis. When she tries to deny it, he offers her a deal—if they are married, he will not be forced to testify against her. Eve marries him but cheats on him flagrantly with a young actor. When the actor makes a joke about her laugh lines she demands that Webster repair them. Webster deliberately destroys her face and proves to be a master manipulator himself, making Eve completely dependent on him. Alexandra, meanwhile, falls in love with the psychiatrist Peter Templeton; they marry and have a son, Robert. The book closes at Kate's ninetieth birthday party with all her relatives present. Robert, now eight, is turning into a talented pianist. Kate sees him as Kruger Brent's heir but Peter laughs her off and asks her if she never gave up. Alexandra too tells Kate that she is happy doing whatever Peter wants. Looking around at her family, including Tony, who was released from the institution for the occasion, and a masked Eve, Kate still believes that she acted in the best interest of all and that it was she who has been cheated, even though everyone in her family has been negatively affected by her actions. In the last line of the book she tells her great-grandson, Robert that she would introduce him to the great musician Zubin Mehta. At this point the readers are left to interpret the ending - does she sincerely means it and has she really changed, or is she planning a repeat of what she did to her son Tony? |
Passage | Connie Willis | 2,001 | Joanna Lander, a clinical psychologist, interviews patients who have had near-death experiences; she aspires to understand what occurs between the times when a person dies and then is revived. She becomes frustrated when many of her patients cannot or will not give accurate information about their experiences. She realizes that the scientific evidence is contaminated by the influence of Dr. Maurice Mandrake, a persistent charlatan "researcher" who publishes books about near-death experiences and convinces patients that their experiences happened exactly the way his books describe NDEs, such as learning cosmic secrets from angels. Dr. Richard Wright, who has discovered a way to induce artificial NDEs in patients and monitor their brain activity throughout, contacts Joanna and asks if she will join his research study and interview his patients after he induces NDEs. She agrees. They are intellectually compatible and have a budding, mutual romantic interest. Mandrake considers them competitors, and he sabotages their efforts by approaching revived patients before they can. Mandrake's method is to ask mellifluous leading questions of the patients and thereby taint their self-reported NDEs; this causes Joanna and Richard hardship in finding volunteers for the study. Lacking enough volunteers for proper methodology, Joanna elects to undergo the process. She gets the help of Tish, a good nurse, to help with the prep; Tish is happy to, because she thinks Richard Wright is "cute" and can flirt with him while Joanna is "under". Joanna finds herself in a dark passage that, through further NDEs, she realizes is part of a dream-like version of the RMS Titanic, on which she encounters passengers of the real Titanic as well as someone symbolically near death, a high school teacher of hers, Mr. Briarley. Between NDE sessions, Joanna struggles to figure out why she sees the Titanic, and she eventually tracks down Pat Briarley, her English teacher from high school, who spoke often of the Titanic in class. Joanna discovers that Mr. Briarley, once a highly animated and keen teacher, now suffers from Alzheimer's disease. This is crushing to Joanna, who was certain that Mr. Briarley could give her "the key" to clarify why she sees the Titanic. However, Mr. Briarley's niece, Kit, promises to help. Joanna also consults with Maisie Nellis, a girl who suffers from a heart defect, "V-fib", because Maisie, a born rationalist, gives only accurate information about her NDEs. Maisie also gives Joanna important information about the Titanic. Through talking with her patients and undergoing more NDEs, Lander realizes that the near-death experience is a mechanism that the brain uses to create a scenario symbolic of what the brain attempts to do when it is dying: find a suitable neural pathway by which to send a message that can "jump start" the rest of the body back into life. If the person having a real near-death experience can metaphorically send a message to someone appearing in the NDE, she learns (specifically, from a revived coma patient), the person will awaken and survive. Before she can tell Richard Wright about her discovery, she goes to visit Nurse Vielle in the Emergency Room and is stabbed by a man deranged by a drug called "rogue". Before losing consciousness, she manages to say a few words to Vielle, trying to communicate her discovery about NDEs. She finds herself in the Titanic again and races against dream-like obstacles to escape and awaken. Richard Wright, on hearing that Joanna is dying or dead, enters an artificial NDE, thinking that he will find himself in the Titanic and be able to rescue Lander. He instead finds himself at the offices of the White Star Line, where the names of the victims of the Titanic disaster are being read to the public - he is too late to "save" Joanna. He awakens many hours later, and Tish, crying, tells him that Joanna has died. As Richard and Joanna's friends struggle with her death, Joanna herself remains in the Titanic until it sinks, and her memories of life fade away. Richard realizes that Joanna was trying to tell him something before she died (they had discussed the importance of last words), and he tracks down all the people she spoke to before she was stabbed. He learns what Joanna discovered. Before she could reach him, Joanna had told, of all people, Mandrake, "The NDE is a message. It's an SOS. It's a call for help." Grasping her dying message, Richard develops a chemical treatment that he believes can revive a patient. Maisie suffers V-fib and dies, but Richard successfully uses his experimental treatment on her, and she later receives a heart transplant; she will live. Within her final NDE, on an imaginary ship, Joanna finds herself adrift on the water, with some memories still intact and accompanied by a child and a dog which Maisie has told her about from other disasters. As the novel ends, they watch the approach of a ship repeatedly mentioned by Ed Wojakowski. |
The Body Artist | Don DeLillo | 2,001 | Lauren Hartke and her film director husband, Rey Robles, are occupying an isolated house outside New York City. They have a sparse verbal exchange over breakfast before Rey leaves for work. Later that morning, Rey is found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his first wife's Manhattan apartment. An obituary detailing the frequently ambiguous details of Rey's life ensues, where Rey's age (64) is revealed, along with his history of depression and the fact that Lauren had been Rey's third wife. A bereaved Lauren remains alone in the house against the advice of her friends and relatives. She becomes disconnected from the temporal world and from her own body, experiencing frequent and inexplicable déjà vu. Lauren spends the subsequent hours, days and weeks exploring this disconnection. She practices her trademark 'bodywork'-- aerobic and stretching techniques she has developed to prepare her body for performance pieces. Lauren also integrates a sequence of daily rituals, including chopping firewood and gazing for hours at webcam footage of a road in Kotka, Finland. One morning, Lauren hears a noise coming from the upper floor of the house. She goes upstairs to investigate but finds no one there. Lauren goes upstairs again the next day. This time, she finds a man sitting in one of the bedrooms. The man's appearance varies each time Lauren sees him, but in this first incarnation, he is described as "smallish and fine-boned [resembling] a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep" (43). |
The Tree Bride | Bharati Mukherjee | 2,004 | The quiet brahmin girl from Bengal becomes a passionate resister of foreign rule, against the British Raj. The narrator discovers her ancestor's struggle for her land, whilst seeking to establish herself as an American citizen. |
Ronin Hood of the 47 Samurai | null | null | In the story, the master shogun and his disciple Blizzard, start battling the evil ronin of the Ako Prefecture. |
Wife | Bharati Mukherjee | 1,975 | This is the story of Dimple Dasgupta who has an arranged marriage to Amit Basu, an engineer, instead of marrying a neurosurgeon as she had dreamed about. They move to the United States and experience culture shock and loneliness. At one point, she jumps rope to escape her pregnancy. As frustration becomes expressed as abuse, the tale turns to tragedy. |
The Loveday Scandals | Kate Tremayne | 2,003 | St John Loveday has been cleared of murder, but forced to leave England for America until the scandal of his trial dies down. His wife Meriel has left him to seek her fortunes elsewhere, and Adam Loveday is still at sea on his ship Pegasus. Meanwhile, Japhet Loveday, spurned by the love of Gwendolyn Druce, leaves the peace of Cornwall for London. There he begins an affair with the treacherous actress Celestine Yorke. As bad fortune continues to dog him, he turns to highway robbery to settle his debts. When Gwendolyn arrives in London, Japhet realises how much he still loves her. But Celestine Yorke is not a woman to be trifled with and she is determined that if she can't have Japhet, then no one will. Edward Loveday is also shocked by the arrival of his illegitimate daughter Tamasine, who puts his relationship with his wife under immense strain. |
The Tiger's Daughter | Bharati Mukherjee | null | The story revolves around Tara who was raised in Calcutta, educated at Vassar College in New York and is married to an American man. The novel explores her sense of culture shock when she travels back to India intertwined with the political situation in Calcutta and West Bengal. |
The Loveday Honour | Kate Tremayne | 2,004 | Japhet Loveday has been convicted of highway robbery and sent to prison, where he faces deportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay. His wife Gwendolyn races to prove his innocence, but powerful men are working to ensure she will be too late. Meanwhile, Edward Loveday's marriage is stretched to breaking point as he struggles to hold together the shipyard and family estate despite his deteriorating health. He is fighting a losing battle however, and finally dies from the effects of a gunshot wound that never fully healed. St John returns from America on hearing of his father's death. But there are further shocks for him - Meriel, his estranged wife, has returned from London after being discarded by her wealthy lover. Bankrupt and desperately ill from tuberculosis, she seeks to reinstate herself into the Loveday family and become mistress of Trevowan, the family estate. |
Ghost Warrior | Lucia St. Clair Robson | 2,003 | The Chiricahua Apache chief, Victorio, called his sister Lozen his wise counselor and his right hand. He said she had the strength of a man and was a shield to her people. Even in a society possessing extraordinary courage, endurance and skill, she was unique. The Apaches believe that when she was young, the spirits blessed her with horse magic, the gift of healing and the power to see enemies at a distance. In the Apaches’ 30-year struggle to defend their homeland, they came to rely on her strength, wisdom, and supernatural abilities. Because of her gift of far-sight, she was the only unmarried woman allowed to ride with the warriors and fight alongside them. After her beloved brother Victorio's death, she joined Geronimo's band of insurgents. With Geronimo and fifteen other warriors, she resisted the combined forces of the United States and Mexican armies, and the heavily armed civilian populations of New Mexico and Arizona Territories. She and the sixteen warriors, and seventeen women and children held out against a total of about nine thousand men. :Smoke from the grass fire smudged the blue sky of early May, but it did not obscure the footprints in the moist sand in the arroyo. The footprints weren’t a mystery. For miles the soldiers had been following the woman who made them. :“She’s heading up the canyon.” Lt. Howard Bass Cushing beckoned to thirteen of the sixteen privates in the company. “These men and I will trail her. Sergeant Mott, you and Collins, Green, Pierce, and Fichter cover the rear.” :“The tracks are too clear, sir,” said John Mott. :“What do you mean?” :“The squaw set her feet down heavy. She avoided places where the prints won’t show. Looks like she wants us to follow her.” :“More than likely she doesn’t know we’re here. She’s being careless.” :“Apaches aren’t careless.” Rafe knew that disagreeing with Cushing wouldn't change his mind, but he had to try. … Rafe kept his peace on the subject of Cushing and stared at the thorny landscape until his eyes watered. :“If I were an Apache. I’d set up an ambuscade in that canyon,’ said Mott. “That dry gulch is a sack waiting to close around us.” :As though on cue, rifle fire reverberated across the canyon. Where no Apache had been, dozens appeared. Cushing and his troops retreated and joined Mott and Rafe to form a line, firing as they fell back. :The Apaches advanced down the slope in two lines, keeping formation rather than scattering… |
Tithe : A Modern Faerie Tale | Holly Black | 2,002 | Tithe follows the story of sixteen-year-old American Kaye Fierch, a young nomad who tours the country with her mother's rock band. The book begins in Philadelphia, at a gig her mother's band Stepping Razor is playing in a seedy bar in Philadelphia. After her mother's boyfriend and guitarist, Lloyd, attempts to stab her mother under the enchantment of Nephamael (a knight of the Unseelie Court) her mother takes her back to Kaye's grandmother's house in New Jersey to stay. Once at her grandmother's house, Kaye begins to look for her old "imaginary" friends she had during her childhood, faeries named Lutie-Loo, Spike, and Gristle. However, she fails to find them and, begins to suspect that they were simply figments of her imagination. Her suspicions dissolve when she finds and saves the life of Roiben, a faerie knight, by pulling an iron-tipped arrow from his chest. In return, he grants her three truthfully answered questions about anything she chooses, which she does not immediately use. Soon after this, Spike and Lutie-Loo contact her and warn her that Roiben is a murderer who has killed Gristle. As revenge, Kaye tricks Roiben into telling her his full name (she later learns that faeries can be controlled by their true names). Later on, her friends tell her that she is a changeling and that she should keep her human appearance, because the Unseelie Court wishes to use her as a "Tithe" in order to bind the Solitary Fey to the Court's queen, Nicnevin. Since Kaye is not mortal, the ritual will be forfeit, and the fey whom the Unseelie Court wishes to bind will go free. Kaye attempts to control her newfound abilities by enlisting the help of a Kelpie to teach her how to use magic. She is soon kidnapped by a group of fairies, as planned and is taken to the Unseelie Court to go through the sacrificial ceremony. Before the ceremony Roiben takes her to be prepared, having a dress made for her and allowing her to stay with him the night, where they acknowledge their feelings for one another. At the climax of the ceremony, Kaye uses Roiben's name to order him to free her from her bonds before she is killed, resulting in a bloodbath between Roiben and the court before they flee safely. In the process, he kills the queen of the Unseelie Court and many of her guards. Kaye and Roiben spend the day at Kaye's home, and discover that strange events are affecting the mortal world. Odd reports of mauling and kidnappings are reported on the news and Roiben makes Kaye understand that this is a result of the solitary fey being free for the next seven years. Kaye receives a call from her friend Janet, inviting her to come to a Halloween rave held at the waterfront, she tries to persuade her not to go but fails. After a failed attempt to receive help from her "imaginary" faerie friends, Roiben and Kaye attend the rave. They are separated, and Kaye successfully locates her friends, but briefly leaves them to apologize to Janet's boyfriend for bewitching him earlier in the novel. However, she finds that the kelpie who lives near the waterfront has taken Janet into the water to kill her. In the novel, it is suggested that Janet went with him out of loneliness and a desire to get revenge on her boyfriend for going off with Kaye. Kaye follows but is too late and she manages to convince the kelpie to relinquish her body. Roiben finds Kaye mourning for her friend and gets her home. The next morning, she and Roiben travel to the Seelie Court's camp some distance away to see if Corny is there. They reach a dead end, but discover that the knight (Nephamael) has proclaimed himself the king of the Unseelie Court. Roiben is suspicious of the situation and thinks that it is a trap for Kaye and him. Later, Roiben's suspicions are proved correct when they enter the Unseelie Court. Nephamael, who had discovered Roiben's true name from Spike before killing him, uses it to take control over Roiben. He orders him to seize Kaye, but Roiben uses trickery to let her get away. Kaye then devises a plan to poison Nephamael, while Corny and Roiben amuse him. She goes through with it; however, before Nephamael is dead, the Seelie Queen arrives, hoping to take over the court (right after her arrival Corny goes insane and stabs Nephamael multiple times, ultimately killing him). Roiben prevents the Queen's takeover attempt by claiming the throne as his. |
The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | 1,973 | This novel covers the time from when Arthur Pendragon was conceived to when he was crowned a king. In this version, Merlin's father is Aurelius Ambrosius, the Roman war leader, Uther Pendragon's brother, making Merlin Arthur's cousin. Merlin is depicted as twenty-two years old at the beginning of the book, which opens on the morning after the conception of Arthur. This conception has taken place as a result, not of illusion or shape-changing as in the legends (and as Merlin would like people to believe), but of ordinary human disguise and misdirection. Duchess Ygraine is said to have known who she was mating with and whose son she bears from the moment Uther came to her. Merlin goes into hiding, to avoid trouble. He learns that Uther wishes the child to be hidden, until another (legitimate) son is born. In later chapters, Merlin travels from one place to another, arranging for the upbringing of Arthur. He gives the child first to his own nurse Moravik, who after some years sends the boy to Count Ector of Galava to be trained as a man. Merlin sets off for Constantinople, accompanied by a small retinue of servants. In Constantinople, he learns from his host Adhjan that Magnus Maximus (also known as Macsen Wledig) possessed an especially beautiful and well-made sword, which was taken back to Britain after Macsen Wledig's death. Inspired by a dream which he believes to be prophetic, Merlin returns to the North in search of this sword. In Wales, Merlin finds the sword in a deserted temple of Mithras hidden beneath the altar with a spearhead and a chalice. He takes only the sword. In order to hide from overly curious people, Merlin becomes a hermit in an obscure shrine, providing healing to the injured and advice to the insecure. He commits himself to no religion, but "allows" whatever god is willing to receive the offerings at the shrine. Later, Merlin becomes Arthur's tutor and that of two other boys, those being Arthur's foster-brother Cei and his friend Bedwyr. Out on a ride, Arthur discovers the sword of Macsen—his ancestor and Merlin's—hidden in a cave on an island in the center of a lake. Naming it Caliburn and laying it to rest in the altar of the Chapel Perilous, he goes on to win his first battle in a decisive victory against invading Saxons. His parentage is revealed and he is named the heir of High King Uther Pendragon; facing a challenge to his fitness as the next High King, he returns to the Chapel and draws forth Caliburn as proof before the assembled nobility. |
Manifold: Space | Stephen Baxter | 2,000 | Alien activity is discovered in a Kirkwood gap; the aliens are identified as self-replicating machines (von Neumann probes). Their activity is potentially an immense threat, as Malenfant notes in an earlier speech: "A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore program for massive and destructive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us. And so we colonize, and build." The self-replicating spacecraft are named Gaijin (Japanese for "foreigner"), after their discovery by a Japanese observer on the Moon. Malenfant travels in a prototype fusion engine to the Kirkwood Gap and discovers an interstellar teleportation device. His travels around the galaxy uncover information about the Fermi paradox (see below). At the same time, the story also follows the efforts of Humans on Earth and the eventual draining of the Earth's resources, making a move off-world necessary. At the same time small group of humans use anti-aging techniques and an alien form of interstellar teleportation to "parachute" in on the changing solar system over many centuries. Eventually, it is revealed that in this version of the Fermi paradox, sentient life is endemic throughout the universe; Humanity simply hadn't noticed it earlier because the universe destroys any race before it becomes advanced enough to develop a Type IV civilization. The story ends with Malenfant helping the Gaijin build a shield to prevent a pulsar from sterilizing a large part of the galaxy. Although this project will not be completed before another predicted pulsar event wipes out all extant species, it is hoped to give the sentient aliens who develop from the aftermath of the coming extinction a better chance at long term survival. |
The Best Awful There Is | Carrie Fisher | 2,004 | It is about a bipolar young actress, Suzanne Vale, who married a studio executive, Leland Franklin, who helped her find her "far-flung best self." He then left her, for a man, when their daughter, Honey, was three. Now, three years later, Vale is a successful TV talk show hostess with a six year old daughter, a gay ex-husband, and an aging starlet mother. It is her love for Honey that keeps her going. When Vale, a recovering drug addict, stops taking her medication, she is plunged into a manic episode. She goes on a search for OxyContin in Tijuana with a tattoo artist friend and new house guest, a clinically depressed patient she met at her psycho-pharmacologist's office. A psychotic break lands Vale at Shady Lanes, where she is the "latest loony to hit the bin." Despite her mental illness, Vale still has her wit and ability to find irony in every situation as she struggles back from the brink of insanity. "You entered the hospital broken, found some other like broken patient people, and once in their company, looked down on the other more pathetic inhabitants of the bin you shared, those flying even lower than you and your lo-flung co-conspirators." Pharmacological facts and scenes from group therapy are revealed. Rather than hide the truths of mental disorders, the humor serves to highlight them. A happy ending is contrived for Vale and Honey, a sweet little girl, but a little happiness in the midst of all the craziness is a good thing. |
Fearless, A Novel of Sarah Bowman | Lucia St. Clair Robson | null | In 1845, Mexico would not relinquish its claim to Texas, and the U.S. prepared for war. Under the command of General Zachary "Old Rough and Ready" Taylor, Sarah signed on as a laundress and cook and bivouacked with Taylor's army in Corpus Christi, preparing for an attack by Mexico. Before the war even began, though, her husband was killed. But going home was out of the question. She considered the army her home and its soldiers her family. Nowhere else would her courage and compassion be so much needed and appreciated. While the battle raged around her, Sarah became a familiar figure through the haze of sulfurous blue smoke and the stench of exploding gunpowder, riding among the flames to retrieve the wounded. Through the long years of bitter battle, she would find love in the arms of a sergeant with eyes as golden as a flame, and friendship in the company of Cruz, a Mexican woman whose personal history encompassed the war in all its passions and horrors. |
Walk in My Soul | Lucia St. Clair Robson | 1,985 | Walk in My Soul is the story of Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee, the young Sam Houston, and the Trail of Tears. Tiana grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of the Cherokee. In a tribe that revered the life force that was female, she became a beloved woman—priestess, healer, and teacher. Known as the "father of Texas", the young Sam Houston ran away on a lark from his family's general store in Maryville, Tennessee, to live among the Cherokee. He hunted and played ritual games with the men and was adopted as a headman's son and was known as "Raven". Houston falls in love with Tiana, but due to their differing racial and cultural backgrounds, conflict ensues. |
Light a Distant Fire | Lucia St. Clair Robson | 1,998 | Osceola had no illusions that the struggle would be an easy one. But after years of humbly acquiescing to the white men's demands, he was ready to fight no matter what the cost. The young men would have the chance to earn war honors. Their women would have reason to be proud of them again. When "Old Man" Jackson declared war on the Seminole, he never envisioned battling a people who would become symbols of courage, loyalty, and patriotism. Led by the mighty warrior Osceola and witnessed by his beloved daughter Little Warrior, they were men and women fighting an unjust war of greed and aggression—and the bonds of love and rebellion that united them would thrust them into the heart of a conflict that would change the world and their lives forever. |
Incest: From a Journal of Love | Anaïs Nin | 1,992 | The book covers the conclusion of her and Henry's relationship with June, as well as her relationships with her analysts. Among other events, she re-establishes contact with her absent father Joaquín Nin, becomes pregnant with Miller's child and eventually has an abortion in her sixth month of pregnancy. She examines all of these events with a sharp eye through the filters of psychoanalysis, and herself becomes an experiment for psychoanalysis by symbolically appointing her husband Hugh Guiler as her father, Henry Miller as her husband, and her father as her lover. |
The Loveday Pride | Kate Tremayne | 2,005 | With the death of his father, St John Loveday is finally master of Trevowan. But his success is blighted by the presence of his treacherous wife Meriel who, despite being riddled with pox and consumption, manages to cling on to life long enough to thwart his plans to marry a rich widow from America. Embittered by his failure, St John soon turns to drink and gambling while his hatred towards his brother continues to fester. Adam meanwhile has been putting all his energy into rebuilding the ruined estate of Boscabel, which he intends to create as a rival to Trevowan itself. And on the far side of the world, Gwendolyn races to reach her estranged lover Japhet and give him his pardon. But Japhet has sworn to live an Honorable life, and to return to England with pride. He has made a promise, and pride will not allow him to abandon his obligations. The girl on the front cover is performance artist, Abi Lake. |
The Fifth Mountain | Paulo Coelho | null | For a considerable portion of the story Elijah is very compliant, obeying everything God's angels say. Eventually he realizes that his destiny is not being chosen by him but by God and ultimately, he decides to abide by his own desires and will. In this way Coelho suggests that Elijah was able to reach an ultimate level of spiritual awareness and have the most powerful relationship with God. ar:الجبل الخامس cs:Pátá hora de:Der fünfte Berg es:La quinta montaña fr:La Cinquième Montagne it:Monte Cinque ka:მეხუთე მთა ne:द फिफ्थ् माउन्टेन pl:Piąta Góra pt:O Monte Cinco ru:Пятая гора tr:Beşinci Dağ |
The Valkyries | Paulo Coelho | null | The plot involved Paulo going to the Mojave Desert to meet "the Valkyries" themselves, a group of warrior women who travel the desert on motorcycles. At the beginning of the story, "J", Coelho's master in RAM, shows him a copy of the poem by Wilde that says "we destroy what we love" and this theme is central to the story. * A story about Paulo and his wife as they embark on an adventure to find his guardian angel. ar:فالكيريس es:Valquirias (novela) pt:As Valkírias ru:Валькирии (роман) |
Unnatural Causes | P. D. James | null | While staying with his Aunt Jane in Suffolk, Adam Dalgliesh stumbles across a most bizarre and frightening murder. A local detective novelist, Maurice Seton, becomes himself the subject of investigation when his boat washes ashore with his body inside, with both his hands cut off, seemingly with a meat cleaver. Strangely, the scene of his death is mirrored in a manuscript for the new thriller he was writing... |
A Winter Haunting | Dan Simmons | 2,002 | Dale Stewart, a character from Summer of Night, has ruined his life. A fifty-one year old college professor and writer, he left his spouse for a young co-ed and the co-ed has left him. He returns to Elm Haven, Illinois, where the events of Summer of Night took place. Dale is remembering these events as more pleasant than what actually happened. He will soon recall the truth and also must deal with current-day Neo-Nazis. |
Smoky the Cow Horse | Will James | 1,926 | The story details the life of a horse in the western United States from his birth to his eventual decline. It takes place after the 1910s, during which the West dies away and there are cars. Smoky is born in the wild, but is captured and trained by a cowboy named Clint. Clint is taken by Smoky's intelligence and spirit, and uses him as his personal steed. Under his guidance, Smoky soon becomes known as the best cowhorse around. Unfortunately, Smoky is among a number of horses stolen by a horse thief. When Smoky refuses to allow the thief to ride him, being loyal only to Clint, he is beaten repeatidly in punishment. Developing an intense hatred for humans from this treatment, Smoky eventually attacks and kills the thief. When Smoky is eventually captured by local authorities, his now violent and aggressive demeanor prompts his use as a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Under the moniker of "The Cougar", Smoky becomes the most famous rodeo attraction in the South West, and people come from miles away to attempt to ride him. Years of performing at the rodeo eventually take their toll on his body and spirit, and he is left a shell of his former self. As he is no longer of any use as a rodeo horse, he is renamed "Cloudy" and used as a riding horse, and then later sold to an abusive man who starves him. It is during this time that Clint is finally reunited with Smoky. While in town on business, Clint spots and recognizes the horse. After having Smoky's current owner arrested for his acts of cruelty, Clint reclaims him and takes him home with him. Although Clint initially despairs at the condition Smoky is now in, his careful treatment of the horse eventually begins to show results. In the end, Smoky has completely recovered his former health and personality. An illustrated edition was issued in 1929. |
Dobry | Monica Shannon | 1,934 | Dobry is a young boy who lives in a small farming village in Bulgaria with his widowed mother and grandfather. Both of them are dedicated farmers, and Dobry spends much of his early life helping them in the fields. The majority of his free time is spent with his best friend, Neda, the daughter of the village shoemaker. While still young, Dobry discovers a found love for art, in which he displays an unusually high amount of natural talent. In order to pay for the art supplies he needs to practice, he takes on the job as the village cow herder, and spends the next several years honing his artistic skills. While Neda and Dobry's grandfather are impressed and supportive of his dedication to his craft, his mother becomes increasingly worried and agitated. She had always assumed that Dobry would take over the family farm as an adult, and sees the time that Dobry spends with his art as wasted time that he could be using to help with the work. However, Dobry's grandfather is slowly able to convince her that talent like his should be allowed to develop. When Dobry creates a beautiful snow sculpture of the nativity that the whole town praises, his mother finally realizes how skilled her son truly is. At the following New Year celebration, Dobry's mother presents him with a surprise gift: money that she has saved up in order for him to enroll in an art academy. While Dobry excitedly begins to prepare for his new life, Neda worries that he will be leaving the village forever. However, he assures her that once he has completed his education, he will return to the village and marry her. |
Saved | Edward Bond | null | The action of the play may be assumed to take place over a period of many months, or even a few years. Len, a young London man, has a new girlfriend, Pam. The play opens with Pam bringing Len back to her house. They eat sweets. When Pam's father Harry passes, Len encourages Pam to pretend that they are having vigorous sex, so that Harry will overhear them. Pam is amused by Len's behaviour. Len and Pam go boating on a lake in a local park. Pam is showing signs of being bored of Len. In charge of the boats is Fred, a friend of Len's. He shows interest in Pam. Len becomes a lodger in Pam's house, although Pam has now left him for Fred. It is clear that Fred does not treat her well, and Len is sympathetic. Pam is grateful for the sympathy, although she finds Len irritating. Pam becomes pregnant by Fred, and has his baby. Pam's mother Mary becomes fond of Len, although Pam gets increasingly annoyed by his presence in the house. Over the course of one scene, Pam fights with Len and with her mother Mary while the neglected baby cries continually. When Len suggests that something needs to be done about caring for the baby, Pam responds "Put it on the council", i.e. hand it over to child welfare authorities. Fred goes fishing, watched by Len. Fred confides in Len that he is disenchanted with Pam. Fred and Len's friends Pete, Colin, Mike and Barry turn up, as does Pam, who is wheeling the baby in a pram. Not wanting to be left in charge of the baby, Fred loses his temper with Pam, who in turn becomes angry and leaves the baby with him. Len leaves. Pete, Colin, Mike and Barry tease the baby, at first harmlessly then with increasing roughness. Fred does nothing to stop them. Barry observes that babies are only animals that don't feel pain. When the baby dirties its nappy, they rub its face in the mess. The violence escalates as they strike the baby and ultimately throw stones at it, Fred joining in. The park is about to close and they run off, Fred returning only to fetch his fishing tackle. Pam returns to retrieve the baby and talks to it absently, not having noticed that it has been stoned to death. Still oblivious, she wheels it away. Fred is sent to prison for his part in the baby's death, but far from accepting responsibility he is chiefly outraged at the way the crowd outside the prison was treating him. Len admits to him that he saw them attack the baby, but didn't intervene. Fred's response is that that will not help his case. He has finally finished with Pam. Len is still lodging with Pam and her parents. Pam is hoping that Fred will get back together with her when he is released from prison. Len feels a sexual attraction to Mary, Pam's mother, and flirts with her; she is flattered, but doesn't act on it. Pam and Len go to a coffee bar, where Fred will come to celebrate his release. Fred, Colin, Pete, Mike, Barry and Fred's new girlfriend Liz turn up. Although Fred is glad to have been released he is edgy and tense, and is disgruntled to notice that Pam is there. When Pam confronts him and asks for him back, he explodes and calls her a "bloody menace", before leaving in disgust. The others follow, except for Len. Pam finally realises that Fred does not love her, and Len offers himself as a substitute, although she does not respond. Harry confronts Mary about flirting with Len. They argue, and she hits him on the head with a teapot. A chair is also broken. Len helps Harry fix himself up and Harry reveals that he does not bear Len a grudge. Harry tells Len that Len's problem is that he didn't get to fight in World War II : "Yer never got yer man", i.e. Len has never killed anyone in combat. In the final scene, Len slowly and methodically repairs the broken chair while Harry does his football pools, Pam reads a magazine and Mary does housework. The otherwise entirely silent scene contains only one line of dialogue, from Len to Pam: "Fetch me 'ammer." Although he ends up having to fetch the hammer himself, the family has not completely disintegrated. Edward Bond described the end of the play as "almost irresponsibly optimistic". |
The Devil's Alternative | Frederick Forsyth | 1,979 | The story opens with the discovery of a castaway in the Black Sea. Recovering in hospital in Turkey, the man is visited by Andrew Drake, an Anglo-Ukrainian. The castaway, Miroslav Kaminsky, is a Ukrainian nationalist who escaped after he was betrayed to the KGB. Drake convinces Kaminsky that they should strike a blow against the Soviet Union. Kaminsky tells Drake about Lev Mishkin and David Lazareff, two Ukrainian nationalists who may be able to help him. Meanwhile, a chain of failures at the Soviet Union's plant that makes fungicide for wheat has led to the inadvertent poisoning of the wheat crop. The United States is aware of this crisis and plans to sell its food to the Soviets in exchange for political and military concessions. Hardliners in the Politburo come up with a different strategy: to take the food from the West by invading Western Europe. The Politburo, led by Chairman Maxim Rudin, narrowly votes down the war plan; however, Rudin is dying of cancer and it is only a matter of time before the faction in favor of war gains supremacy. The news of the war plan comes to British intelligence agent Adam Munro through a Russian woman, who works in the Kremlin offices and has access to the records of Politburo debates. The information shakes both the British and U.S. political leadership. Mishkin and Lazareff, with the help of Drake, complicate the situation for Rudin by killing his ally in The Politburo, the chief of KGB. Mishkin and Lazareff hijack a Russian airliner to escape from Ukraine. They are arrested in West Berlin after one of the pilots is shot dead during landing. Drake wants to help them because only they can reveal truth about the death of the KGB chief. Drake and other Westerners of Ukrainian origin hijack an oil supertanker and request freedom for Mishkin and Lazareff. The coastal countries threatened by ecological catastrophe support the release of the prisoners. US president Matthews receives information from the British that the USSR will stop negotiations regarding grain and military concessions if the prisoners are released. So there appear to be only two options: an ecological catastrophe, or a war that the USSR will start against western Europe. This is the 'Devil's Alternative' of the title. Munro devizes a third option which enables the prisoners to be released (thus ending the oiltanker hijack) without them being able to reveal that they have killed the KGB chief. |
Gump and Co. | Winston Groom | 1,995 | After the death of Jenny, his wife, and failure of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, Forrest and his son find a way to stumble through life and history. As in the first book, Gump stumbles through historical American events through the 1980s and early 1990s. On the first page, Forrest Gump tells readers "Don't never let nobody make a movie of your life's story," though "Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter." However, the character is not an idiot savant, as in the first book, but more similar to Tom Hanks' "kind hearted imp". Frequent spelling and grammar mistakes, in the text, are used as a device to indicate the character's deficient education and cognitive difficulties. The story suggests that the real-life events surrounding the film have affected Forrest's life. Gump runs into Tom Hanks. He even goes on The David Letterman Show and attends the Academy Awards. He plays football for the New Orleans Saints, sells encyclopedias door-to-door, works on a pig farm, and helps develop the infamous New Coke. He accidentally crashes the Exxon Valdez, helps destroy the Berlin Wall, and fights in Operation Desert Storm with his friend, an orangutan named Sue (who survived a NASA mission and cannibals, with Gump, in the first book). He meets many celebrities, including Colonel Oliver North, the Ayatollah Khomeini, John Hinckley, Jim Bakker, Ivan Boesky, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Tom Hanks (who plays Forrest in the movie). Throughout the book, Jenny appears to Forrest as a guardian angel, and advises him to "listen to Lieutenant Dan." Lt. Dan frequently mentions a fondness for oysters, and oystering re-vitalizes the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. |
Harvest Home | Tom Tryon | null | Harvest Home is narrated in the first person by Ned Constantine, and describes events surrounding himself, his wife Beth, and their daughter Kate. Fed up with life in New York City, the family relocates to the country, where Ned can pursue an artistic career. After months of intermittent searching for a suitable new home, they discover a geographically isolated village in Connecticut named Cornwall Coombe. The village seems an idyllic farming community that offers all that Ned and Beth have been seeking. They express interest in an abandoned three hundred year old house, and they are contacted some weeks later by the Dodds, who live next door to the house, and who tell them that it is for sale. The Constantines buy and renovate the house and move to Cornwall Coombe. The opening chapters describe several matters in innocent detail, including the past marital difficulties of Ned and Beth, now apparently resolved; the moody Kate's serious, potentially life-threatening asthma, in part a psychosomatic reaction to those marital troubles; and, most importantly, the eccentricities of life in Cornwall Coombe. The villagers adhere stubbornly to what they call "the old ways", eschewing modern agricultural methods and limiting contact with the outside world. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals that revolve around the cultivation of corn, which is their chief product. The most important rite is Harvest Home, which takes place at the conclusion of the crop growing year. While the villagers are ostensibly Christian, Ned gradually becomes aware of the paganism that underlies life in Cornwall Coombe, particularly its rituals. The Constantines befriend the Dodds. Maggie Dodd, an educated woman who left Cornwall Coombe but later returned with her husband, Robert, an outsider. Maggie is the church organist. Robert Dodd, totally blind, is a retired college professor. Other prominent villagers who become friends with the newcomers are Worthy Pettinger, a young man who disdains the old ways and wants to go to agricultural college; Justin Hooke, who serves as the current year's ceremonial "Harvest Lord", and his wife Sophie, whom Justin has chosen to be his "Corn Maiden" in the approaching "Corn Play"; Jack Stump, a local itinerant peddler, only recently arrived; and Mary Fortune, a widowed herbalist and midwife, and the town's most influential resident. During a late summer festival, known as Agnes Fair, Ned first begins to sense something sinister. After most of the festivities are over, Ned hears a horrible cry and beholds a strange spectacle: Missy Penrose, a young girl regarded by the farmers as an oracle, stands over a newly-slaughtered sheep and touches her blood-drenched hands to Worthy's face. Ned learns that this means Worthy has been chosen to be the "Young Lord", who will succeed Justin as Harvest Lord when Justin's seven-year term ends later that year. Worthy is the only one unhappy at this development. Jack Stump reports that he has seen a ghost in Soakes's Lonesome, a local forest named for the family of moonshiners who live within. Ned sees a strange apparition one night, and later finds a skeleton hidden deep within the woods. Worthy decides secretly to leave the village with Ned's help rather than become Harvest Lord. Jack disappears. Ned grows preoccupied with the mysterious death of Grace Everdeen fourteen years earlier: she is buried in unhallowed ground, and the locals still occasionally say harsh but unspecific things about her. Ned finds a primitive corn dolly in Justin's fields. The Widow Fortune succeeds in resuscitating Kate and saving her from certain death during an asthma attack; her herbal remedies apparently cure Kate of her asthma. Ned, under the influence of the Widow's mead, believes he sees the Harvest Lord and Corn Maiden trysting in a neighboring cornfield. During a harvest service in church, Worthy loudly curses the corn and "the Mother" and then flees. The community is scandalized. Worthy's parents are ostracized by the villagers. Jack Stump is found mutilated, having had his tongue cut out and mouth sewn shut in apparent retribution for trespassing into Soakes's Lonesome. Ned becomes more intent to unravel the village's secrets while his personal life goes awry. Tamar Penrose, the postmistress, seduces Ned, whose resistance weakens as he tries to learn more about Missy and her abilities. Ned learns that the women of Cornwall Coombe practice pagan fertility rites connected to the earth mother. Tamar reveals that she served as Corn Maiden fourteen years ago, and that Missy was conceived as a result. Grace Everdeen, originally slated to be Corn Maiden for her fiancé Roger Penrose, had developed a disfiguring disease. When she was replaced by Tamar, Grace cursed the corn. Drought followed, for which Grace was blamed. At the end of the harvest, the villagers come together for a Husking Bee, a riotous party marking the conclusion of the growing season. Ned and other male villagers drink heavily as part of the festivities. During the Husking Bee, the villagers put on the Corn Play, a symbolic fertility rite that foreshadows what will happen at Harvest Home a few nights later. Ned watches stuporously as the women perform a barefoot pagan dance. When the women draw Kate into their circle, Ned furiously breaks into the dance to pull her back out but the villagers cast him into the street and pelt him with corn cobs for interfering in the ritual. The Constantines' marriage has begun to unravel again. Beth had hoped to have another child, but Ned learns that he is sterile. Beth, aware of Tamar's designs on him, grows distrustful of Ned. Ned dislikes and distrusts the rapacious Tamar, but finally has sex with her in which she dominates him, symbolizing the ancient homage that men are forced to pay to the earth goddess. Robert Dodd explains to Ned the matriarchal pagan fertility religions of antiquity, and advises Ned to steer clear of Harvest Home at all costs: previous discovery of the secrets of these rites by any man has always resulted in dire consequences, which Dodd has suffered himself. Dodd removes his dark glasses showing that his blindness is the result of his eyes having been gouged out in retaliation for observing the sacred ritual, but Ned disregards his warnings. Ned's rage at Tamar is further fueled by the discovery that Tamar was involved in the mutilation of Jack Stump. The villagers wanted to prevent him revealing that the skeleton in the woods — the same skeleton that Ned later discovered — belonged to Grace Everdeen, who had resisted the pairing of her fiancé with Tamar at Harvest Home fourteen years earlier, and was killed after arriving and disrupting the rites. The villagers, having learned Worthy's location from a letter he sent to Ned, which was steamed open by Tamar, the postmistress, send a posse to find him. He is returned home and killed. They initially hang his corpse in a field as a scarecrow, and later fling it into a massive bonfire on Kindling Night. On the day of Harvest Home, Justin's wife Sophie Hooke, the new Corn Maiden, hangs herself. She is denied burial in consecrated ground on the orders of the Widow Fortune. Ned denounces the villagers at the church and the widow, a revered high priestess, declares him an outcast. Missy instructs the gathered villagers to confine Ned. Ned escapes from the building in which he is imprisoned via a secret passageway to the church. There, the village women have chosen the new Corn Maiden who is heavily veiled; Ned believes she is Tamar. She departs with the other women and Justin for the Harvest Home ritual. Ned races to the forest clearing ahead of them, determined despite Dodd's advice to discover what happens there. He watches the women play out the rites, which includes the copulation of the Harvest Lord with the Corn Maiden to symbolically ensure the fertility of the Mother. To Ned's horror, the new Corn Maiden is not Tamar, it is Beth. Ned cries out, alerting the women to his presence. He is forced to watch while Justin and Beth complete their intercourse, finally learning why Worthy had tried to escape and why Sophie killed herself: Tamar cuts Justin's throat with a sickle as he climaxes, spilling his blood onto the ground throughout the clearing. The villagers allowed his family to settle here in order to bring new blood, Beth's and Kate's, into Cornwall Coombe. Ned tries to escape but the women surround him and render him blind and mute. Months later, the blind, dependent Ned learns both that Beth is pregnant and that Kate is destined to be the next Corn Maiden. |
Candy | Terry Southern | 1,958 | Candy Christian, aged eighteen, is an extremely pretty and desirable but naïve young woman, who finds herself in a variety of farcical sexual situations as a result of her desire to help others. The men in her life, regardless of age or relationship, wish only to possess her. Having eluded the pursuits of her philosophy instructor Prof. Mephesto, she returns to her father's house, where she plans to allow the family gardener to sexually initiate her. However, her father steps in, and angrily denouncing the gardener as a communist, attacks him and in the ensuing scuffle ends up with a fractured skull. Candy visits him in the hospital. Mr. Christian's twin brother Jack and his lascivious wife Olivia (Livia) are also present. Aunt Livia leaves, and Uncle Jack attempts to have sex with Candy; a nurse enters and wrestles him away from the girl, who escapes, only to find herself in the lair of young Dr. Krankeit, who is studying the salutary effects of masturbation. (Aunt Livia also has an adventure with Krankeit, which she later describes to Candy in a cheery letter.) Back in the hospital room, the patient (in identical head-bandages after the scuffle with the nurse) turns out to be Jack; Candy's father has gotten up quietly and left. On her way to work, Candy encounters a perverted hunchback, whom she takes for a sort of performance artist and invites to her apartment. Subsequently she is propositioned by school friends in a café, and by a gynecologist who overhears their conversation and gives Candy an "exam" in the bathroom. The café is raided by police and Candy escapes with the help of Pete Uspy, an anti-materialist (the only man in the novel with no designs on Candy's body) who sends her to the camp of the peace activist Crackers. Their leader Grindle is a would-be guru who talks Candy into intercourse by couching it in metaphysical terms. When Candy fears she is pregnant, he tells her the next phase of her spiritual journey is beginning, and buys her a one-way ticket to Calcutta, India. Soon after, Candy is meditating in a temple in Lhasa, along with a dung-encrusted pilgrim who sits nearby, when a thunderstorm occurs. She finds herself pinned between the fallen, lightning-struck statue of Buddha and the pilgrim. As he has the usual physical reaction experienced by men in Candy's proximity, she becomes aware of his identity when the rain washes his face clean (it is her father), and the novel closes with her cry of recognition. |
The Russia House | John le Carré | 1,989 | In 1987, Bartholomew "Barley" Scott Blair, a heavy-drinking British book publisher, attends a book fair in Soviet Moscow. There, business friends cajole him into joining them on a drunken retreat to a secluded dacha in the forest near Peredelkino. When discussion turns to politics, Barley finds himself talking boldly of patriotism and courage, of a new world order, and an end to Cold War tensions. One attentive listener, Goethe, asks him privately whether he truly believes in the possibility of such a world. Barley convincingly says that he does. Months later, a beautiful Soviet woman named Katya seeks Barley out at another book fair, hoping to convince him to publish a manuscript for her friend Yakov, which is in truth details the Soviets' nuclear capabilities and atomic secrets. The manuscript has a cover letter to Barley, saying this is Yakov's way of serving his country, by hastening the day when democracy will come to the USSR. However, with Barley at home in Portugal, Katya gives the package to a sales agent with instructions to forward it to Barley. The agent reads the manuscript and recognizes its potential value. When the sales agent is unable to locate Barley, he ultimately turns the manuscript over to British authorities. MI6, specifically a section called the "Russia House", become interested in the manuscript and ask Barley to contact Yakov with a list of verifying questions in order to determine the document's authenticity. Barley is content to stay out of the matter, but the Russia House manipulates him into undertaking the mission. He grows fond of Katya, and schemes of a way to get her out of the Soviet Union. Over the course of several meetings with Katya and Yakov, Barley realizes his nervous informant is very likely under KGB scrutiny. The CIA and MI6 decide one more meeting is needed to verify the authenticity of the data, but Yakov is suddenly "hospitalized" due to purported exhaustion. In a secure phone call, Yakov tells Katya through code that he has been taken and that she is in danger. Barley and Katya realize that any further meeting is merely a KGB scheme to draw them out into the open. Barley receives a message that he must bring "a final and exhaustive" list of questions on Soviet research. He makes contact with one of his Soviet publishing associates and uses his connections in the KGB to arrange a meeting with Yakov's handlers. Although the CIA and MI6 set up a major surveillance operation of the meeting site, Barley goes missing along with the last set of questions, presumably arrested. More than a year later, after several unconfirmed sightings in Moscow, Barley shows up in Portugal, offering no explanation for his absence. Neither the CIA nor MI6 are inclined to interrogate him, reasoning that the KGB has already worn him down to get the information they needed. They are resigned to the fact that the "manuscript" had been KGB bait all along. The truth, however, is that Barley traded the questions for the freedom of Katya and her family. The philosophical Barley reasons that governments are not the only ones who can manipulate and betray, and some things are more important than the games that spies play with others' lives. |
Appointment with Venus | Jerrard Tickell | 1,951 | In 1940, after the fall of France, the fictitious Channel Island of Armorel is occupied by a small garrison of German troops under the benign command of Hauptmann Weiss. He finds that the hereditary ruler, the Suzerain, is away in the army, leaving the Provost in charge. Back in London, the Ministry of Agriculture realise that Venus, a valuable pedigree Guernsey cow, remains on the island. They petition the War Office to mount a rescue operation, and Major Valentine Morland is assigned the mission, with the assistance of the Suzerain's sister Nicola Fallaize who joined the A.T.S. at the outbreak of war. They travel to Armorel by submarine, contact the Provost and other friends on the island, and discover that Weiss, a cattle breeder in civilian life, is about to have the cow shipped to Germany. By a series of elaborate deceptions, they extract Venus from Weiss's command and succeed in returning her to England. |
The Fourth K | Mario Puzo | 1,990 | President Francis Xavier Kennedy is elected to office, in large part, thanks to the legacy of his forebears–good looks, privilege, wealth–and is the very embodiment of youthful optimism. Too soon, however, he is beaten down by the political process and, disabused of his ideals, he becomes a leader totally unlike what he has been before. When his daughter becomes a pawn in a brutal terrorist plot, Kennedy, who has obsessively kept alive the memory of his uncles’ assassinations, activates all his power to retaliate in a series of violent measures. As the explosive events unfold, the world and those closest to him look on with both awe and horror.The novel's emphasis is on the characters. The reader learns about a character's background when he/she has to make a major decision. Critics have stated that, once the book has focused on a particular character, he/she is relegated to the background and never again returns to prominence. Mario Puzo has stated: "The Fourth K was a [commercial] failure—but it was my most ambitious book." |
Once on a Time | null | null | When the King of Barodia receives a pair of seven-league boots as a birthday present, his habit of flying over the King of Euralia's castle during breakfast provokes a series of incidents which escalate into war. While the King of Euralia is away, his daughter Hyacinth tries to rule in his stead and counter the machiavellian ambitions of the king's favourite, the Countess Belvane. |
Hyperspace | Lionel Fanthorpe | 1,994 | Michio Kaku tries to explain higher dimensions, first analyzing the history of higher dimensions of space and the struggle to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity in one theory. He then goes on to detail theories concerning the 2-D world, named "Flatland". The end of the book discusses such topics as wormholes, parallel universes and the fate of the universe. |
The Throne of Bloodstone | Michael Dobson | null | In The Throne of Bloodstone, the player characters take a trip to the Abyss to steal the wand of the demon prince Orcus. This module is recommended for characters between levels 18 and 100. They play the rules of Bloodstone Pass. A war against the Witch-King of Vaasa has come to a standstill. The players venture into the 'Abyss', destroy a mighty demon, steal the Wand of Orcus and take it to the Seven Heavens to be destroyed. The battle between the mighty undead army of the Witch-King of Vaasa and the forces of Bloodstone has come to a standstill. As long as the source of the Witch-King's power is at work, his evil forces will never be defeated! This module requires the Player Characters, as the rulers of Bloodstone Pass if following the series, to find the true power behind the Witch-King and defeat it. The module requires the players to journey to the Abyss, confront Orcus, one of its greatest demons, steal the Wand of Orcus, and destroy it. The wide range of levels the module is for is dealt with in several ways as well as the general principles described above for dealing with 100th level characters. For some encounters either the number and/or type of opponents vary or the NPC's reaction to the characters vary depending on the total level of the party. Some areas in the module like the city of liches or the city of 100,000 demons, are really too difficult for any party to take out directly and require approaches other than brute force. |
The Brothers Lionheart | Astrid Lindgren | 1,973 | 9 year old Karl Lejon has found out that he is going to die. His adored big brother, 13 year old Jonatan, calms him down and starts telling him about life after death. In the afterlife, all men will go to a land on the other side of the stars, known as Nangijala, where they're still in "the campfires and storytelling times". But Karl is not happy; it could still be over 90 years until Jonatan joins him there. Jonatan assures Karl that time is different in Nangijala and that 90 years will only feel like a few days to Karl. Some time later a fire spreads throughout their home. Jonatan rescues his little brother by carrying him on his back and jumping out the window, but is fatally injured in the fall. During Jonathan's funeral, the priest saints him "Jonathan Lionheart" to tribute his courageous act. Karl is left alone, and starts to wonder if the story about Nangijala is really true. A white pigeon appears one night on his window sill, and Karl interprets it as a confirmation that it is. Two months after his brother Jonatan, Karl dies of his illness. Right before he dies, he leaves a message for his mother: "Don't cry mother, we'll see each other again in Nangijala". Immediately after his death he finds himself standing outside a small cottage. He is no longer sick, and runs down to a river, where his brother is sitting and fishing. Jonatan tells him that they will be living at the Riders farm in the Cherry Valley. They each have a horse, Grim and Fjalar, and a short time of peace and joy follows, with fast riding and discovery expeditions. They have finally come to Nangijala, a land which seems to be remicent of the earlier Swedish Middle Ages. Karl meets Sofia, whose rose garden Jonatan tends. He is gradually informed that there are problems even in Nangijala. On the other side of the mountains lies Törnrosdalen (the Thorn Rose Valley) which has been occupied by the evil Tengil, who has descended from the country of Karmanjaka with his men and built a wall around it. He has enslaved the original inhabitants. With the dragon Katla at his service, he appears unbeatable. Jonatan does not wish to tell Karl about Katla, since he fears knowledge of her would frighten Karl. The people of the Cherry Valley, led by Sofia, help the resistance movement in the Thorn Rose Valley, but they know a traitor exists in the village. Someone from the Cherry Valley is helping Tengil, as Sofia's white doves, which fly with secret messages between the valleys, are being shot down with a bow and arrow. One day Jonatan leaves for the Thorn Rose Valley, where the resistance leader Orvar has been arrested and sits in custody in the Katla cave. His sense of duty makes him go, igoring the dangers. Karl is left alone, and after a few days he attempts to follow his brother. One night he hides in a cave, and later. two of Tengil's men wait outside it to meet the traitor, who turns out to be Jossi the tavernkeeper and not Hubert, as Karl had expected due to his shrewd and open contempt for Sofia and his skills as a marksman. Jossi is branded with the "Katla mark" on his chest to demonstrate his allegiance. In the morning, Karl is discovered by the two soldiers. They are suspicious and bring him to the Thorn Rose Valley. Karl tells them he lives with his grandfather, and the soldiers demand that he show them his house and his grandfather. Luckily an old man is standing outside a small house with a white dove, and Karl throws himself into the old man's arms. The soldiers are satisfied. The old man, Mattias, is also part of the resistance movement, and inside the house Karl finds Jonatan asleep. A happy reunion ensues when the two brothers meet again. Mattias' house lies right next to the high wall, and there are constantly guards from Tengil snooping around to see if someone is doing something forbidden, with capital punishment for a wide range of offenses, including keeping weapons and traveling outside after dark. Jonatan is digging an underground tunnel which will go from Mattias' house, under the high wall and end in a forest on the inside. When Tengil himself shows up in the Thorn Rose Valley, everyone has gathered in the square. He is dressed in black, rides on a black horse and looks cruel. All the men in the village have to get in a line and Tengil picks out the ones who will be brought to Karmanjaka as slaves to build his impenetrable fort, on which they will work until they are too weak and then they are given to Katla. A married man who is chosen protests and publicly denounces Tengil, claims that he will die as well and spits on him. The man is quickly subdued and executed on the spot. Jonatan has almost completed the underground tunnel. The brothers manage to escape the valley. As they stop to bathe in the river, they must hide from groups of soldiers. One of the soldiers rides out into the fast-flowing river to show his bravery, but almost drowns. Jonatan shows empathy with the enemy soldier by saving him and his horse from drowning. When they sit down to camp at the Karma Falls, Karl gets to see Katla - who turns out to be a firebreathing female dragon - for the first time, the dragon that Tengil uses to terrorize and control the people. Tengil controls Katla with the help of a trumpet, which he called to rally more men to his defence when Katla woke from a near-eternal sleep and entered his castle. The next day the brothers cross the river, using the suspension bridge that connects the Thorn Rose Valley from Karmanjaka. The entrance to the Katla cave is guarded by Tengil's soldiers, but Jonatan manages to find a second entrance. Deep in the mountain they arrive at the Katla cave where Orvar is kept. They manage to release Orvar from his wooden cage moments before he is to be collected and fed to Katla, and their escape is soon discovered. They ride back as fast as they can towards the Karma Falls and the bridge, but the pursuing soldiers start overtaking Karl and Jonatan, who are both riding on Grim. Karl throws himself off the horse and hides in a ditch so that Jonatan and Orvar can escape and start planning the rebellion. When the pursuing soldiers have gone away, Karl moves on to the place where they went swimming, and hides in a tree. At dusk three familiar people show up: Sofia, Hubert and the traitor Jossi. When Karl tells Sofia that Jossi is the traitor, she gets angry. Once Jossi's shirt is forced off, and everyone can see the branding on his chest, they understand. Desperate, Jossi escapes by throwing himself into a small boat, but the current catches him and takes him to certain death in the waterfall, upon which Karl cannot resist crying despite his treason. Shortly thereafter, the people of the Thorn Rose Valley rise up against Tengil and his men, and Jonatan reluctantly agrees to join the fighting despite his pledge never to take a life, even if it ment the loss of his own. Orvar mocks him, claiming that if everyone were like him evil would prevail forever, but Karl points out that if everyone were like Jonatan, evil would not exist. The battle commences and claims the lives of Veder, Kader, Mattias, Hubert and many others, before Tengil shows up with Katla, who he (being ignorant of the rebellion until this point) brought to punish the people of Thorn Rose Valley. All seems lost, but Jonatan manages to attack Tengil himself and pull the horn out of his hands. As Katla no longer fears Tengil, the dragon instead attacks him and his men, and finally kills the tyrant. Having turned the tide of the battle in favour of the liberators, Katla comes under the tenuous control of Jonatan. Once the fight is won, Orvar asks Jonatan to bring Katla back to the Katla cave, and vows to kill her himself when starvation has weakened her enough to be approached safely. When Jonatan and Karl rides over the suspension bridge, their horse Grim gets frightened and Jonatan drops the trumpet down into the river. Katla then chases them up the mountain. They finally hide high up on a cliff where Jonatan pushes a big rock down on Katla. Katla falls backwards into the river, and a fight breaks out between Katla and the (male) lindworm Karm. The two beasts, who have been waiting for this battle since the beginning of times, savagely kill each other. Jonatan and Karl set up a camp and Jonatan explains that during the fight he was burned by Katla's fire, and that he will soon become totally paralysed. Jonatan tells Karl about the land that lies after Nangijala called Nangilima, a land of light where there are only happy adventures. Karl does not want to be separated again from his brother so he carries him on his back to a cliffdrop and they jump together. Karl's last words while falling are: "Oh, Nangilima! Yes, Jonatan, yes - I see the light! I see the light!" |
Prizes | Erich Segal | null | The novel deals with the relationships of all the three characters, and how life brings them together. Adam Coopersmith, an Obstetrician and Immunologist, helps in saving the life of Thomas Hartnell, known as the "Boss" in Washington, who is one of the advisors to the President of the United States, and arguably, a man holding more personal power than the President himself. Adam's mentor, Dr.Max Rudolph, takes a slight detour from his ethical conduct and gives an FDA unapproved life saving cancer treatment whose efficacy is proved in his laboratory, to Hartnell. Adam serves as the attending doctor and ends up falling in love with Hartnell's daughter Antonia, who is the Assistant Attorney General in Washington. After the demise of Max Rudolph, who is more of a father figure to Adam than a professional colleague, Adam is broken and finds solace in Antonia's arms. They get married and have a daughter, Heather. However things soon start changing as Adam and his daughter slowly start realising that Antonia is married to her career, and in her list of priorities family figures quite below her work and her father. This slowly leads to a rift between Adam and Antonia, and he is drawn to Anya Avilov, the childless and abandoned wife of a Russian émigré Dr.Dmitri Avilov. Dmitri abandons Anya when he realises she is incapable of conceiving, and Adam, the attending obstetrician, rushes to fill in the gap in both his and her life. Eventually, Adam divorces Antonia and marries Anya. Antonia wins custody of Heather, but Heather always remains more attached to Adam rather than Antonia. Adam commits suicide unable to bear the crushing burden of Alzheimers Disease, a few days after he hears that he has won the Nobel Prize. Sandy Raven is the son of Sidney Raven, a Hollywood producer. Sandy has an inferiority complex about his looks, which gets reinforced over time as he faces the conspicuous lack of a social life throughout his teenage years. He joins MIT to study Genetics. His teenage love, Rochelle Taubman, uses him to get to his father and thereby gain entry into Hollywood. She very conveniently forgets Sandy after she gains contacts in Hollywood. She ends up doing seedy bit parts, and eventually, on the centerspread of Playboy. Sandy is unable to get over this betrayal and turns into a repressed person who is desperate for female company. He falls in love with his lab director's daughter, Judy Morgenstern. His mentor and Laboratory director Gregory Morgenstern, cheats him out the Nobel Prize by not mentioning his contribution on a project. This leads to Judy and Sandy's divorce, but Sandy finds solace in the love of his daughter Olivia, who, in turn studies physics under Isabel later in the book. Sandy finds love in a Japanese woman, Kimiko, and becomes a reputed scientist in Genetics. Isabel Da Costa is the daughter of Raymond Da Costa, and is a genius with an IQ far above average. Raymond recognizes this early on in her childhood and begins to run her life with an iron hand, thereby causing his marriage with Isabel's mother Muriel to go into ruins. They also have a son Peter who is very close to Isabel, and who thinks that Raymond is ruining Isabel's youth. Muriel wants Isabel to have a normal life, and Raymond is stubbornly intent on making Isabel win a nobel prize for physics, to vindicate his own failure in having a good academic career. Isabel is denied all pleasures of a normal teenage life with a punishing schedule in academics, and becomes a post graduate student at Berkeley before she has completed eighteen years of age, owing to her extraordinary powers of comprehension. She falls in love with Jerry Pracht, the son of her Thesis advisor Karl Pracht, in spite of her father's repeated efforts to keep them apart. Jerry is a genius himself, who has quit the pressure of academics and is an ace tennis player. Isabel also longs to rebel against the pressure of being a genius and encourages this relationship on the sly. Her father realises that his hold on her life is detrimental, and gracefully moves out of her life. Isabel goes on to win the Nobel in Physics and strengthens her relationship with Jerry to a commitment. |
Gil Blas | Alain-René Lesage | null | Gil Blas is born in misery to a stablehand and a chambermaid of Santillana in Cantabria, and is educated by his uncle. He leaves Oviedo at the age of seventeen to attend the University of Salamanca. His bright future is suddenly interrupted when he is forced to help robbers along the route and is faced with jail. He becomes a valet and, over the course of several years, is able to observe many different classes of society, both lay and clerical. Because of his occupation, he meets many disreputable people and is able to adjust to many situations, thanks to his adaptability and quick wit. He finally finds himself at the court as a favorite of the king and secretary to the prime minister. Working his way up though hard work and intelligence, Gil is able to retire to a castle to enjoy a fortune and a hard-earned honest life. <!-- |
The Beauty Myth | Naomi Wolf | 1,991 | In the book, Wolf argues that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony. In her introduction, Wolf offers the following analysis: Wolf also posits the idea of an "iron-maiden," an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for their failure to achieve and conform to it. Wolf criticizes the fashion and beauty industries as exploitative of women, but claims the beauty myth extends into all areas of human functioning. Wolf writes that women should have "the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women's appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically". Wolf argued that women were under assault by the "beauty myth" in five areas: work, religion, sex, violence, and hunger. Ultimately, Wolf argues for a relaxation of normative standards of beauty. |
The Silent Boy | Lois Lowry | 2,003 | The Silent Boy is told by Katy Thatcher, an old woman in 1987, about a critical period in her life from 1908 to 1911. Katy, whose father is a community doctor, dreams of becoming a doctor herself. Katy takes an interest in Jacob, a “touched” boy from a neighboring farm, who can't speak, but somehow hums quietly to himself, and seems able to communicate with animals. Jacob occasionally comes to the Thatcher home to be in the barn with the animals. Katy shares Jacob’s love of animals and comes to feel she can communicate with him in a rudimentary but empathetic way. When Nell, the sister of Jacob, has a baby out of wedlock by Paul Bishop, Jacob is aware of the trouble. He abducts and brings the baby to the Thatcher's house on a stormy night, hoping to save it the way he has saved orphaned lambs by bringing them to a substitute mother. But it doesn't go the way he had planned it to. Later, Katy marries Austin Bishop and becomes a doctor. 50 years later the Asylum closed and Jacob was never seen again. There were no records of him there. |
Alongside Night | J. Neil Schulman | 1,979 | The story is set in United States on the brink of economic collapse, where inflation is spiraling out of control and the government struggles to keep hold of its power. Trading in foreign currency has become illegal and many shops are subject to rationing. As a result there is a sprawling black market for almost all conceivable goods. The setting reflects the world as Samuel Edward Konkin III conceived it would be just prior to a successful agorist revolution. The story begins with Elliot Vreeland, son of Nobel Laureate economist Dr Martin Vreeland (an economist of the Austrian school) hearing of his father's apparent death and being rushed home from school. He quickly discovers however that the death is fake, a plot concocted by his father (after receiving a tip-off) to escape arrest by the FBI who are rounding up "radicals" accused by the government of worsening the economic crisis. Eliot is sent by his father to collect some gold coins that had been stored in a safe location, for use as hard currency during the families intended escape. However, upon his return Eliot finds his family to be missing. Not long after, FBI agents enter the house searching for Eliot who manages to escape. Eliot's escape leads him into contact with the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre, an organisation plotting the downfall of the US government through the means of counter-economics. The cadre has grown strong over the years of its existence, and has its own militia and extensive underground network. Eliot enlists the help of the Cadre, and meets Lorimer, a girl similarly on the run from the law. As the novel progresses, government stability weakens still further, and they bring in tight controls on communication, travel and trade, however they fail to avert total collapse, leading to the private sector (unions, individuals, syndicates and many others) taking control of the old infrastructure. |
The Coffin Dancer | Jeffery Deaver | 1,998 | The Coffin Dancer struck 5 years ago, killing two techs who worked with Lincoln Rhyme, and it seems he has struck again. Then it was a bomb in a wastebasket, this time it's on a plane. A coverup is witnessed, a hitman hired, and all hell breaks loose. There are three key witnesses the Dancer has been hired to kill and he just finished off the first. The police and the Federal Bureau Investigators are desperate to keep the last two safe as well as finding the killer behind the bombing. Rhyme is more interested in just finding the Dancer. He drops his current case and dives head first, so to speak, into the evidence. Amelia Sachs, his arms and legs, is sent off to every crime scene in hopes to find that one shred of evidence to pin down the killer. The crime scenes pile up as they get closer to their man then they could ever hope to be, but still he outsmarts them. This game of cat and mouse they play ends many lives, just to save the two. |
The Machine Gunners | Robert Westall | 1,975 | The story is set during the Second World War and deals with a group of six children living in the North East of England. Their town, Garmouth, regularly suffers bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe. One of the children, Chas McGill, finds a crashed German He 111 bomber and takes a fully operational machine gun and over two thousand rounds of ammunition. With the help of his friend, Cyril "Cemtery/Cem" Jones, the pair intend to set up their own fortress with their friends, including a boy from Glasgow called "Clogger" Duncan, and another boy, nicknamed "Carrot Juice" on account of his ginger hair and freckles. They also team up with a girl called Audrey Parton, and a boy, Benjamin "Nicky" Nichol. They name their "Fortress Caporetto", after a World War I battle in which Chas's grandfather fought. Later a bomb lands on Nicky's house and he is presumed dead. According to Chas's puritan neighbour Nicky's mother and a man were found "dead in their bed of sin with not a stitch on". Nicky has actually survived, and, understandably shaken and upset, he hides in the Fortress, where he is found by the gang. After this, only his friends know he is alive. During an attack by an Me 110 fighter, the children fire their gun at the plane. They miss but, surprised, the plane swerves into the path of an AA gun and is shot down by three Spitfires from the nearby airfield at RAF Acklington. The pilot is killed; rear gunner Rudi Gerlath bales out, injuring his ankle on landing. The victor of two air battles, Rudi evades capture for many days, until his ankle is sufficiently healed to allow him to walk again. He then discovers the children's hidden fortress and is promptly arrested by the children, who take his pistol. Only later does he realise that the machine-gun has been damaged and is not working. The children do not wish to reveal their secret so do not hand Rudi over to the authorities, but keep him prisoner at their fort, where Clogger and Nicky now live permanently. After a while Rudi is bribed with the offer of a boat belonging to Nicky's dead father, if he will mend the gun. He agrees and mends it before being taken to the dock where he rows off. The same night the church bells ring, the alarm signalling a German invasion. The children hurry to the fortress but do not see anything; it was a false alarm. Out at sea, Rudi finds he does not have the strength to row to German-occupied Norway and is forced back to England. He rejoins the children at the fortress. The next day it is realised that the children are missing, and some Polish refugee soldiers are drafted in to look for them. The children, on seeing troops speaking in a foreign language, open fire on them with the gun believing they are a German invasion force. The children are soon overpowered, however, and forced to surrender. In the chaos, Clogger shoots and wounds Rudi with his own Luger pistol, but the injury is not fatal. The very well-made fortress is surrendered to the Home Guard, then Clogger and Nicky are taken to a children's home while the other children are handed over to their parents. A sequel, Fathom Five, set two years later, was published in 1979. |
Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by | Thorbjørn Egner | 1,955 | The book is about the peaceful town of Kardemomme and the people there, as well as the only characters which stir up serious trouble. They are the three robbers, Casper, Jasper and Jonathan who live outside the town and regularly enter to steal the things they need. In the end the robbers are arrested, but good treatment in the jail by the kindly constable Bastian reforms them, and in the final chapter they become the heroes of the day when they extinguish a fire in the tower of the town. At the end Casper becomes the town's fireman, Jasper becomes the town's circus manager and Jonathan becomes the town's baker. |
Regency Buck | Georgette Heyer | 1,935 | Judith Taverner is a beautiful young heiress who comes to London to join high society. She takes an instant dislike to her unwilling guardian, Julian, fifth Earl of Worth, who, having met her earlier in a small town filled with bucks watching a boxing match, treats her with a familiarity reserved for loose women. Judith soon becomes a sensation in London. She gets many offers of marriage (including one from the Duke of Clarence). Worth does not permit her to marry any one of them. This initially makes Judith very angry, but she comes to appreciate it later. Judith has a younger brother named Peregrine (Perry) who is a young handsome boy with very little sense and a lot of money to spare. Hence, he is always getting into trouble. Perry and Judith's cousin Bernard Taverner seems always so kind and attentive, though there is little love lost between him and Worth. Perry keeps getting into scrapes. He is challenged to a duel, gets held up, and nearly gets poisoned. Worth suspects that Bernard is the villain and he sends his brother, Captain the Hon. Charles Audley to watch over Perry. Meanwhile, Bernard tries to convince Judith that it is Worth who is the real culprit. In the end, after Worth provokes Taverner into acting, the truth comes out and Bernard is shown to be the guilty one. The sparring and eventual love affair of Judith and Julian, against the backdrop of Judith's brother Peregrine's romance and danger, make up this novel. Miss Heyer's An Infamous Army is a sequel to Regency Buck. |
Friday's Child | Georgette Heyer | 1,944 | The wild young Viscount Sheringham is fast running through his considerable income through gambling and other extravagant pursuits; and he cannot as yet touch the principal, unless he marries. As the lady with whom he currently fancies himself in love, the beautiful Isabella Milborne, is also an heiress, he proposes. Isabella rejects him with contumely, citing his dissipated lifestyle. A lively quarrel then follows with his obnoxious widowed mother and her brother, who wish to retain control of his father's fortune themselves. The Viscount storms off in a fit of pique, vowing to marry the first female he meets. This turns out to be the pretty but orphaned and shy Hero Wantage, who has secretly loved him since they were children, and who now lives with one of his neighbours in the position of Cinderella, complete with Ugly Sisters. The rest of the novel, chronicling the Viscount's gradual transition to maturity and the realisation that the one he really loves is Hero (the "loving and giving" child of the title), is told with Miss Heyer's characteristic wit, and features some of her most memorable dialogue, plot twists and characters (such as the fiery but lovelorn George Wrotham, whose hobby is fighting duels). |
The Gem and the Staff | John Van De Graaf | null | Gem and the Staff is an adventure for a DM and a single player using a provided thief character. The player must search for a magic gem and a staff of power inside an evil wizard's tower. This module is divided into two separate adventures, which can be played as successive scenarios. The player takes the role of an experienced thief named Eric the Bold, who is pressed in both adventures into special thieving services. In the first adventure, Eric's task is to steal a certain gem from the trap-riddled tower of the wizard Tormag. The second adventure involves Tormag hiring Eric to steal a mighty magic wand from his arch-rival Felspel. Both modules are set with a time limit of thirty real-world minutes to complete the task. |
Star Wars Republic Commando: Hard Contact | Karen Traviss | null | The story begins during the Battle of Geonosis with Clone Commando Darman and his team assaulting a Separatist position. However, the entire squad is massacred in the attack, with Darman being the only survivor. After the battle, he is grouped with other clone commandos in incomplete squads and meets Niner, Fi, and Atin. All four commandos must learn how to work together as a team, as they had in their previous squads. It is not long before the newly formed squad is given another mission. This time, they are to be inserted onto the planet Qiilura, deep in Separatist territory in order to destroy a research facility developing a nanovirus that specifically targets clone troopers. They also must capture the lead scientist, Ovolot Qail Uthan. However, the facility is guarded by Ghez Hokan, a fearsome Mandalorian mercenary who shows little mercy to his enemies or friends, and commands a small army of militia, Trandoshan slavers, and droids. When the squad attempts to land on the planet, their ship suffers mechanical problems and is forced to crash land, resulting in Darman being separated from the others. Meanwhile, a young Jedi Padawan, Etain Tur-Mukan, is on the run after her master, Jedi Master Kast Fulier, is killed by Hokan. She goes into hiding and is sheltered with the help of a strange woman named Jinart. Meanwhile, Niner, Fi, and Atin run across and defeat several Separatist patrols in an attempt to find Darman and complete their objective. With Jinart's help, Darman and Etain link up but Etain lacks the self-confidence to lead and tells Darman to take charge. They then manage to reunite with the rest of the squad and make their plans to attack the research facility. Jinart reveals herself to be a Gurlanin, shapeshifting native animals of Qiilura, and gives them vital information on how to approach the facility. Etain and the commandos attack the facility and manage to destroy it and take Uthan prisoner, but Hokan does not give up without a fight, nor does his lieutenant, who wounds Atin and, through shrapnel, Uthan. He fights the Republic forces valiantly, but is eventually outsmarted and killed by Etain who decapitates Hokan with her lightsaber. After their victory, Etain gains a little more confidence in herself and her abilities. As the extraction dropship arrives, Etain desperately wants to leave with the commandos, but Jedi Master Arligan Zey has different ideas. He wants Etain to stay with him on Qiilura to organize an anti-Separatist resistance movement, and that she would be far more valuable to the Republic by staying behind. Etain reluctantly agrees and parts ways with Omega squad, and especially Darman, as they leave. S.S. |
The Cestus Deception | Steven Barnes | null | Set during the Clone Wars, the story follows Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Kit Fisto and their adventures as ambassadors on the planet of Ord Cestus, which has started producing so-called "Jedi Killer" droids. While, Obi-Wan Kenobi takes the diplomatic approach with the leadership, Kit Fisto and a clone trooper squad start recruiting and training fighters from the working class of the planet to incite a rebellion, should Obi-Wan fail. While they deal with the intrigue and politicking of the locals, as well as intervention by the Sith minion Asajj Ventress, a love affair forms between one of their clone trooper bodyguards Nate and a female pilot who is attracted to the clone template Jango Fett. |
Memories of Midnight | Sidney Sheldon | null | The plot of Memories of Midnight takes off from the ending of The Other Side of Midnight, where Catherine Douglas is recovering in a convent. The world thinks that she has been killed by her husband Larry Douglas and his mistress Noelle Page, except Constantin Demiris, known as Costa. But Catherine wants to discover herself and know who she is. The only thing she knows is that her name is Catherine Alexander. She requests to see the world outside the convent in order to reveal her past. This request is granted by the Sister of the convent, but only after getting the approval from their mentor Constantin Demiris. It is there in Greece that she realizes that her husband and his mistress tried to kill her. She remembers them trying to drown her and this becomes a recurring dream. When she tells all this to Costa, he is a bit angry as he didn’t want her uncovering her past as she is the last link to the case in which Larry and Noelle were wrongly accused of killing her and sentenced to death. So he sends her off to London to work in one of his various offices. At this point in time, Constantin Demiris seems like a benefactor to Catherine as she has no knowledge of what Constantin Demiris has planned for her. Trouble starts brewing when Frederick Stavros begin to feel guilty for sending Larry and Noelle to their death as he was their lawyer and they were all tricked into pleading guilty by Napoleon Chotas. He dies shortly after confiding this news to a priest who after his death tells this news to an employee working in the office of Spyros Lambrou, the brother of Costa’s wife Melina. This news reaches Spyros Lambrou who uses this news to destroy Costa as Costa had maltreated his wife, Spyros’ sister. This is when Napoleon Chotas starts fearing for his own life. He leaves a package with a prosecuting attorney, Peter Demonides, and sends a tape referring to this to Costa. The next day Chotas’ house is burned down. He dies and the package is delivered to Costa, rather than the authorities by Peter, who starts working for him. Meanwhile, Catherine finds a good friend in Kirk Reynolds who is in love with her and wants to marry her although Catherine is a bit reluctant. She confides in him that her husband and his mistress attempted to kill her and were executed for it. Kirk reassures her by saying that from the little he knows about Greek law he is confident that their law doesn’t sentence anyone to death on account of attempted murder. Still, he will make sure by asking one of his acquaintance, Peter Demonides. Within a day of relating Catherine's story to Peter, he dies. In the meantime, Spyros tries to destroy Costa by narrating this incident to a drug dealer, Tony Rizzoli and advices him to trick Costa into taking one of his drug shipments to USA. But Constantin Demiris kills Tony and destroys his shipment and then threatens Spyros by telling him that he will destroy him but will first take care of his sister. When Spyros tells this to Melina, she assures him by saying that she can take care of herself. Her brother’s house is attacked but he and his wife survive the attack. This is when she becomes confident that Costa wants to destroy them. Hence, she kills herself and fakes it in such a way that it seems that Constantin Demiris has murdered her. Meanwhile, Costa has ordered the killing of Catherine Alexander. Costa gets arrested for the murder of his wife. The only one who can save him is Sypros Lambrou, who can give an alibi for the time of the murder but, won’t do so as he detests Constantin Demiris and wants him dead. This is when Napoleon Chotas makes a reappearance after mysteriously surviving the fire, which burned his house. He fights the case of Constantine Demiris. He convinces Spyros into giving testimony for Costa, arguing that instead of having him dead it will be better if he forces him to live in poverty. This will be achieved by Costa transferring all the assets of his company to Spyros in return for SPyros' testimony. On the other hand Costa and Chotas have already planned that the assets of Costa’s company will first be shifted to a firm owned by Napoleon Chotas himself, so that Spyros will get nothing. Catherine goes into psychoanalysis but in turn falls in love with the doctor Alan Hamilton who also falls in love with her. This is when 3 men arrive in London to study the operation taking place there and they all seem pretty weird and she has a bad feeling about them but it is not until she is to be killed that she realizes that it is not the 3 men but the office boy who came along with them who has come to kill her. He tries to kill her by locking and tying her up in the basement and turning up the thermostat of the boiler which will explode when it reaches 400 degree Celsius but she manages to survive by hiding in the bomb shelter. She comes to know the truth about Costa and also the fact that he was convicted. She marries Alan. Constantin Demiris is being tried for a murder he didn’t commit but, on the last day of the gruesome 10 day trial, Spyros Lambrou testifies, setting Constantin Demiris free. Afterwards, on the way to Napoleon’s home, Napoleon confide in Costa that even he liked Noelle Page though he still helped him in killing her. He starts driving faster and tells him that he has donated all the assets of his company to the convent. Finally, he drives the car over the cliff down the steep mountainside. “ The car tumbles end over end until it finally crashes in the sea. There is a tremendous explosion and then a deep silence and its was over.” (quoted from the book Memories of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon) |
The Quiet Game | Greg Iles | null | The novel is of investigative crime fiction genre, entailing the main character of Penn Cage. Cage travels back to his home town of Natchez, Mississippi with his daughter after his wife died. He is a successful novelist, with a legal background, and finds that his father is being blackmailed over a long forgotten murder by a criminal who he never turned in to the police. Penn soon finds himself in the middle of hidden racial tension and prejudice towards blacks within the heart of Natchez. He soon realises that the case he is involved with is much bigger than he expected. He joins forces with Caitlin Masters, a beautiful young newspaper journalist, and meets his high school love interest in a quest to find justice and the truth. |
The Traveler | John Twelve Hawks | 2,005 | In the shadows of modern society an epic battle is fought. One woman is standing between those who try to control mankind and those who will risk their lives for the freedom of us all. On one side the Brethren, using high-end surveillance technology for control, supported by officials and politicians. On the other side the Travelers, the gifted ones, who are able to leave our realm and cross over into other realities. Because of their knowledge they are a great threat to the Brethren. The Travelers are supported by the Harlequins, a group only trained to defend the Travelers and to save them from the Brethren. Harlequins are trained since birth by their parents and other Harlequins. They are able to use all kinds of weapons, but their favored arm is a unique Harlequin sword they carry with them all the time. Maya, a pretty young woman, is trying to live the life of a normal citizen. Her background, on the other hand, is anything but normal. She is the daughter of a famous German Harlequin named Thorn, who had been badly injured in an ambush by the Brethren. On a mission she killed two men of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. As a consequence Maya had tried to hide and leave her Harlequin past behind until one day her handicapped father calls for her. When visiting him in Prague, she finds him slaughtered by his enemies. Fulfilling her father's last wish, Maya takes a flight to the States supporting Shepherd, the last American Harlequin. She is determined to help him defend the last two Travelers alive. However, Shepherd has become a member of the Brethren. Working for the other side now, he tries to kill Maya. With the help of a young woman named Vikki she is lucky to get away. Vikki is a member of the I. T. Jones Church, a church of followers of the Traveler Isaac T. Jones, who was killed by the Brethren in 1889 with Lion of the temple (known as Zachary Goldman) a harlequin. Together they are able to find an ally, Hollis, a Capoeira trainer from Los Angeles and a former member of the Isaac T. Jones Community. The three of them are able to find the last living Travelers, Michael and Gabriel Corrigan. Before they are able to give them protection, Michael is captured by the Brethren. Instead of killing him immediately they try to convince him to help them. The Brethren recently started a new Program. They were in contact with a technologically advanced civilization dwelling in another realm. Aiming to travel through the realities, they need the help of a guide, someone who is able to travel without technology - like a Traveler. For achieving help, they offer the Brethren high technology, weapons and plans for a quantum computer. The Brethren want to use a real Traveler that can find this other civilization and guide it to the Earth. By offering Michael power, money and everything else he wants, the Brethren convince him to work for them. With a new drug called 3B3, Michael is able to leave his realm without any usual way a Pathfinder would offer. A Pathfinder is a person that helps a Traveler to cross over. He or she is a teacher, but never a Traveler himself. While Michael gains his first experiences with other realms, Maya tries to find a Pathfinder for Gabriel. She herself knows little of other realms and the process of crossing over. At all time they must be careful and live "off the grid”, because the Brethren use all their power to get hold of them. Hollis stays in Los Angeles to place a false track. Within little time the Brethren show up at his house and try to kill him with a new weapon called “Splicer," some kind of genetically engineered animal designed to search and destroy. But, Hollis defeats them. In the meantime Maya and Gabriel find a Pathfinder in the desert in Arizona: an old woman researching king snakes in an abandoned missile silo. While teaching Gabriel how to cross over, she tells him everything she knows about the Travelers and the six realms. There is the first realm of a town like hell, the second realm of a city full of "hungry ghosts", the third is inhabited by animals ignorant of all others, the fourth realm is our own reality, where the sin is desire, the fifth realm is the reality of the "half gods", where the sin is jealousy, and the sixth realm of the "gods" themselves, where the sin is pride. The "gods" and "half-gods" of the fifth and sixth realm are not meant like God as the creator of all life, but like the Tibetans describe them: human beings from parallel worlds. The realms are separated each by four barriers: one barrier of fire, one of water, one of earth and one of air. A Traveler that is capable of passing these four barriers is then able to enter one of the five other realms. If his body on earth dies, his soul, called the light, is condemned to stay forever in the realm it visits at that time. Crossing over into other realities, a Traveler can only carry special objects, called talismans, with him. Such an object is the sword Gabriel’s father gave him. Equipped with this sword, he meets his brother in the realm of the hungry ghosts. His brother tries to convince him to join the Brethren. Gabriel resists the temptation, but he tells his brother where he left his body. As a consequence Gabriel is imprisoned by the Brethren within hours and brought to the research centre where Michael is kept. Maya realizes that an immediate counterstrike is necessary. After an exciting battle in the Brethren's research facility, they free Gabriel but have to realize that they can not convince Michael to leave the Brethren. Maya and her allies are able to find refuge in a house on a beach in Cape Cod - but only to recover. At this point the first book of the fourth realm has a cliffhanger ending. |
Behold the Man | Michael Moorcock | 1,969 | The story begins with Karl's violent arrival in the Holy Land of AD 28, where his time machine, a womblike, fluid-filled sphere, cracks open and becomes useless. By interpolating numerous memories and flashbacks, Moorcock tells the parallel story of Karl's troubled past in 20th century London, and tries to explain why he's willing to risk everything to meet Jesus. We learn that Karl has chronic problems with women, homosexual tendencies, an interest in the ideas of Jung, and many neuroses, including a messiah complex. Karl, badly injured during his journey, crawls halfway out of the time machine, then faints. John the Baptist and a group of Essenes find him there, and take him back to their community, where they care for him for some time. Since the Essenes witnessed his miraculous arrival in the time machine, John decides Karl must be a magus, and asks him to help lead a revolt against the occupying Romans. When he asks Karl to baptise him, however, the latter panics and flees into the desert, where he wanders alone, hallucinating from heat and thirst. He then makes his way to Nazareth in search of Jesus. When he finds Mary and Joseph, Mary turns out to be little more than a whore, and Joseph, a bitter old man, sneers openly at her claim to have been impregnated by an angel. Worse, their child Jesus is a profoundly retarded hunchback who incessantly repeats the only word he knows: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Karl, however, is so deeply committed to the idea of a real, historical Jesus that, at this point, he himself begins to step into the role, gathering followers, repeating what parables he can recall, and using psychological tricks to simulate miracles. When there's no food, he shows the people how to pretend to eat to take their minds off their hunger; when he encounters illness caused by hysteria, he cures it. Gradually, it becomes known that his name is Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, determined to live the story of Jesus to its decidedly bitter end, he orders a puzzled Judas to betray him to the Romans, and dies on the cross. His last, agonized words, however, are not Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, but the phonetically similar English it's a lie....it's a lie...let me down... After Karl's death on the cross, the body is stolen by a doctor who believed the body had magical properties, leading to rumors that he did not die. The doctor is disappointed when the body begins to rot as any normal human would. |
The Speed of Dark | Elizabeth Moon | 2,002 | Lou Arrendale is a bioinformatics specialist, and high-functioning autistic, who has made a good life for himself. A new manager at the firm where he works puts pressure on the department where many autistic people work. Lou is pressured to undergo an experimental treatment that might "cure" his autism. Lou does not think he needs curing, but he risks losing his job and other accommodations the company has put in place for its autistic employees. Lou struggles with the idea of going through this "treatment" for his autism while he pursues fencing with "normal" friends and continues to go to work. His autistic friends, as well as himself, meet together after work and discuss what or what not to do. |
The Never War | D.J. MacHale | 2,003 | Bobby Pendragon and Vo Spader, the Traveler from Cloral, arrive on First Earth (New York City, 1937) shortly after the death of Bobby's uncle, Press Tilton, greeted by bullets from gangsters that Saint Dane has hired. They then meet the First Earth Traveler, who saved them from the gangsters. He is a bell captain at the Manhattan Tower Hotel named Vincent Van Dyke nickname "Gunny". Bobby and Spader become employed as bellhops there, and investigate the ties between First Earth's Turning Point, rival crime godfathers Max Rose and Winn Farrow, and the Nazi party. The critical connection is revealed to be the Hindenburg zeppelin. To understand its significance, Bobby and Gunny visit Third Earth, in the year 5010. The Traveler of Third Earth, Patrick, accesses a computer that predicts the future in which they save the Hindenburg: industrial spies working for Max would lead to the Nazis developing an atomic bomb and disastrously winning World War Two. Bobby and Gunny return to First Earth, only to find that Spader and Rose have gone ahead, seeking to stop Winn Farrow from shooting a firework rocket into Hindenburg. Bobby flown to the LZ-129's launch site by a female aeroplane pilot called Nancy Olsen (Jinx), who has been his friend and client at the Hotel. Once parachuting from the aeroplane, Bobby tracks down Max and Spader, who are seconds from departing to meet Max's airship arrival. Bobby accompanies them, and with Third Earth foresight, manages to save the entire entourage's lives. While on Third Earth, the young Traveler learns that Max Rose was destined to die on the same highway, on the same day, after crashing into a motorcycle cop. With Max unconscious and Spader, convinced stopping the Hindenburg will save First Earth, heading for the airfield, Bobby uses Max's car to follow them. Spader, misunderstanding, tries to stop the rocket from launching; Gunny holds him back, but fails. Spader tries to save the Hindenburg on his own, but is stopped by Winn Farrow. Spader begs Bobby to save the Hindenburg. Looking up, Bobby sees the faces of those who will die in the explosion and is reluctant to let them die. Gunny again intervenes, holding him until the rocket launches and the zeppelin burns. After the whole incident is over, Bobby is upset that Spader's emotions nearly got the better of him which almost lead to the destruction on all three earth territories. Bobby tells Spader to return to Cloral until he learns to control his emotions. Full of angst over his role in the tragedy, Bobby returns to his home on Second Earth (the 20th and 21st-centuries) for a pause in his Travels. After a week, he receives a call from Gunny, and meets him back at Bobby's old house a few hours later. Gunny arrives in a limousine with an elderly man claiming to know Bobby's great grandfather (unknowingly referring to Bobby when he was on First Earth), and explains how Uncle Press had died, describing how an accomplice (who the Gangster revealed to be Saint Dane) persuaded Tony, the gangster's partner, into shooting a Tommy Gun into the flume. He states clearly that he never fired a bullet. He then gives Bobby his traveler ring which the gangster took from him on First Earth. Bobby thanks the gangster, and he and Gunny accompany the gangster down town to the flume. This is where "The Reality Bug" begins. |
Infernal Devices | Philip Reeve | 2,005 | The story begins sixteen years after the events of Predator's Gold, in the grounded Ice City of Anchorage, now "Anchorage-In-Vineland". Wren Natsworthy, the child of Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, is bored with her life in the sleepy static of Anchorage-in-Vineland, and jumps at the chance to join the Lost Boys, who have turned up on the island in search of a mysterious Rasmussen family artifact named the "Tin Book", which is a copy of a document from the Sixty Minute War, found by the original founders of the New Anchorage on an old American Empire nuclear submarine. The Tin Book, bearing the insignia of the President of the United States of America, contains the activation codes for the final remaining orbital weapons platform left over from the Sixty Minute War, potentially with firepower far greater than that of MEDUSA, the energy weapon that destroyed the traction city of London in Mortal Engines. The Lost Boys persuade Wren to give them the Tin Book, and to join them on their journeys around the world. Wren decided to find out what the Tin Book is. She starts by asking Freya knowing that it is in the palace's library. Freya tells Wren that the Tin Book was found on an old American Nuclear Submarine; everyone on board was dead, except for one person who, before he died, wrote the Tin Book. No one knows what it is about or what it is for; all it has in it are random letters and numbers. Then Wren asks Gargle, who is in charge of the mission to get the Tin Book. He tells Wren that Nimrod Pennyroyal wrote a book about the time he was on Anchorage, called PREDATOR'S GOLD. It is selling well, but most of it is a lie, and because it talks about 'Parasite Pirates' towns and cities now have their hulls checked every day, meaning that it is harder to attach limpets (vehicles used by the Lost Boys) to them. So the Lost Boys have had to stop going to the Atlantic Sailors and the Ice Runners; they have had to send their limpets further away, to other oceans, and the central Hunting Ground. Worse yet, they are losing limpets; some of them have never returned, no distress call, nothing. Now raft cities are searching for Grimsby. The Lost Boys need the Tin Book. Gargle claims this is because the ancients made submarines that can last for years underwater and information in the book could get Grimsby moving, however it is likely that Uncle wanted to sell it to either Stalker Fang or the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. Wren steals the book from the library and gives it to the Lost Boys. However, the townspeople of Anchorage find Wren, and believing she is in danger Hester Shaw opens fire on the limpet which is taking her away. She kills two Lost Boys in the process, and Fishcake, the only surviving crew member of the limpet, kidnaps Wren in anger. Fishcake plans to take her to Grimsby but is diverted en route to the raft resort of Brighton by a trap intended to lure limpets to the city, so that their Lost Boy crews can be sold as slaves. The slaves are supposed to be sold to Nuevo Maya, but Wren convinces the owner of the slave trade company to sell her to Nimrod Pennyroyal, now Mayor of Brighton. Tom and Hester set sail with Caul in the Screw Worm to Grimsby to save Wren, unaware that she is in Brighton. Caul, upon returning to Grimsby, just bombed by Brighton's depth charges, defects once more to the Lost Boys. However, Uncle is killed when Caul tries to let Hester and Tom escape, and so Caul and Freya take the remaining Lost Boys not killed by the depth charges back to Anchorage on a spare cargo submarine, while Tom and Hester go to Brighton. Meanwhile, Shrike is 're-resurrected' to mark Stalker Anna Fang's birthday. The Anti-Traction League is extending its borders and the Green Storm has started to bomb and destroy cities, starting a war. This is when the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft is mentioned for the first time. At Brighton, Tom is captured as a slave. After discovering this, Hester sets the slaves in the city free to create a distraction so she can free him, resulting in pandemonium. During the confusion, Tom meets Fishcake, and promises to take Fishcake with him and Hester. Meanwhile, the Green Storm attacks the city, in search of the Tin Book. The Stalker Fang succeeds in obtaining it, and memorises the codes. However, shortly afterwards she is attacked by the once again resurrected Stalker Shrike (Grike in the American editions), who has been programmed by his re-resurrector to tear her apart. He succeeds. Cloud 9, Pennyroyal's floating palace, has been severed in the Green Storm attack. It crash lands in the Sahara Desert, with Wren and newfound friend Theo. The 'Jenny Haniver' is found by Tom and Hester, who have escaped Brighton, but accidentally left Fishcake behind. However, after having spoken with Pennyroyal, Wren discovers that Hester was the one who sold Anchorage to Arkangel in Predator's Gold. After Wren tells this to Tom, Hester flees into the burning wreckage of Cloud 9 in despair, believing her life with him is over. Once within the complex, she encounters Shrike, who carries her out into the Sahara Desert. In the desert, the Stalker Fang's still functioning severed head and body are found by the betrayed and miserable Fishcake, who agrees to help rebuild her. |
Don't Play Us Cheap | Melvin Van Peebles | null | Trinity and Brother Dave are a pair of devil-bats looking for a party to break up. They come across a party in Harlem. Although Trinity is eager, Dave warns him not to touch it. "When black folks throw a party, they don't play!" Trinity joins the party, already in progress, thrown by Miss Maybell in honor of her niece Earnestine's birthday. Trinity first tries to break the records ("you can't have a party without music"), but finds that they are unbreakable. He drinks an entire bottle of liquor, thinking he has depleted their supply of alcohol, but finds out that all of the guests have brought their own bottles, and when he tries to eat all of the sandwiches, another plate is brought in. Trinity finds himself unwilling to continue being mean after he insults Earnestine, making her cry. Trinity apologizes to her, and tells her that he has fallen for her. Three more guests show up, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, and their college-educated son Harold. Earnestine ignores Trinity for Harold. Trinity becomes jealous. Brother Dave arrives in human form, eager to break up the party, but Trinity is unwilling to. Mr. Johnson tells Harold not to get involved with Earnestine, because her family is too "common," and he can't risk the big future he has ahead of him. Earnestine approaches both Harold and Trinity to dance, but they are pulled back by Mr. Johnson and Dave. Dave persuades Trinity to try to break up the party before midnight, when they will both be turned into the thing that they pretend to be: human beings. As time runs short, Dave and Trinity find themselves at the dinner table with the rest of the guests. Dave insults Mrs. Johnson, prompting her to leave with her husband and son. The rest of the guests tell Dave that they're glad that they left. After the dinner, Trinity stands up and announces that he and Earnestine are getting engaged, an announcement which infuriates Dave. Dave makes one last attempt to break up the party by trying to make a move on Miss Maybell. When Dave finds that she is all too willing, he turns himself into a cockroach and tries to sneak out the door before being smashed by Miss Maybell. |
Thérèse Philosophe | null | null | The narrative starts with Therese, from solid bourgeois stock, becoming a student of Father Dirrag, a Jesuit who secretly teaches materialism. Therese spies on Dirrag counseling her fellow student, Mlle. Eradice, and preying on her spiritual ambition to seduce her. Through flagellation and penetration, he gives her what she thinks is spiritual ecstasy but is actually sexual. "Father Dirrag" and "Mlle. Eradice" are named after anagrams of Catherine Cadière and Jean-Baptiste Girard, who were involved in a highly-publicized trial for the illicit relationship between priest and student in 1730. Therese is placed in a convent, where she becomes sick because her pleasure principle is not allowed to express itself, putting her body into disorder. She is rescued by Mme. C and Abbe T. and she spies on them discussing libertine political and religious philosophy in between sexual encounters. Therese's sexual education continues with her relationship with Mme. Bois-Laurier, an experienced prostitute. This is a variation on the whore dialogues common in early pornographic novels. Finally, Therese meets the unnamed Count who wants her for his mistress. She refuses him intercourse, out of her fear of death in childbirth (not unreasonable at the time.) He makes a bet with her. If she can last two weeks in a room full of erotic books and paintings without masturbating, he will not demand intercourse with her. Therese loses and becomes the Count's permanent mistress. |
Weapons of Choice | John Birmingham | null | The book starts in 2021 off East Timor, as a US-led Multinational Taskforce, commanded by Admiral Phillip Kolhammer, prepares to liberate the Indonesian islands from an Islamic government calling itself the Caliphate, which is slaughtering Chinese citizens. In the book's backstory, the Chinese government was planning to send a task force but was warned by the American government not to do so. The flagship of the taskforce is the aircraft carrier USS Hillary Clinton, named after "the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States". The task force is made up mainly of American and British units alongside French, Australian, Japanese and Free Indonesians, along with a few other units like Spetsnaz from Russia and Kommando Spezialkräfte from Germany. Alongside the navy taskforce is the JRV Nagoya, a scientific ship which is experimenting with wormholes; the navy ship protecting it is ordered to join the taskforce. A new ship from the Royal New Zealand Navy is sent as escort, but prior to its arrival, the Nagoya's project director, Manning Pope, decides to make a trial run. The taskforce is constantly watched by a Caliphate spy on the mainland. Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance and Lt. Commander Daniel Black are on the bridge of the , on their way to face the Japanese sent to invade Midway. A growing commotion outside the bridge prompts them to investigate, only to find a large group of what are, to them, unknown and strangely designed ships. They spot a ship with the Japanese ensign and assume it is the Japanese fleet sent against Midway and they order their own ships to open fire. The multinational taskforce Combat Intelligence, referred to as CI, takes defensive action; the 21st century fleet nearly wipes out the American fleet, including the and . During the battle, Kolhammer and the rest of the Multinational Taskforce commanders learn that not all ships of the taskforce came through and those that did, did not all end up in the same place. The HJIMS Ryūjō encounters the Free Indonesian ship KRI Sutanto and boards it. The Indonesians are taken captive, the Japanese learn of the force sent against them at Midway and the rest of the Japanese navy is warned and ordered back home. After the battle between the 1942 American naval force and the 21st century Multinational Taskforce, an unsteady peace starts after they both reach Pearl Harbor. However, murders, rapes and riots happen as the 21st people try to mix with the locals. Kolhammer is flown to California to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Albert Einstein. As time goes by with no sight of the JRV Nagoya, more and more 21st century personnel start to realise they are stuck in 1942. Captain Karen Halabi and the HMS Trident, a Trident-class trimaran stealth destroyer, is ordered back to the Home Island for evaluation and possible transfer of the Trident. However, prior to her and the ship's departure, they take part in a POW rescue in Singapore and Luzon. The rescue is carried out by both 21st century and 1942 personnel. Through the Japanese, Hitler learns about the results of the invasion of the Soviet Union and sends Ribbentrop to negotiate peace with the Soviet Union. |
Lord Loss | Darren Shan | 2,005 | Grubitsch "Grubbs" Grady, the younger child of chess-obsessed parents, grows increasingly uneasy with the recent strange, nervous behaviour of his parents and sister. One night, he finds the mutilated bodies of his family and encounters Lord Loss,a gruesome human-like demon who sets his two familiars, Vein and Artery, on Grubbs. Although Grubbs manages to escape, he is deeply traumatised and is placed in a mental institute. He refuses to respond to treatment until he is visited by his father's younger brother, Dervish Grady, who tells Grubbs that he knows demons exist and convinces Grubbs to finally accept help. After Grubbs recovers, he lives with the rather eccentric Dervish in his mansion near the village of Carcery Vale. Dervish explains to Grubbs that using magic is possible as Grubbs himself used magic to flee from Lord Loss and his minions, members of an otherworldly race known as the Demonata. As Grubbs begins to settle down, he meets and befriends Bill-E Spleen, an orphan who visits Dervish often to learn magic. Fearing for Grubbs’ safety, Bill-E eventually shares his theory that Dervish is a werewolf, as many Gradys were prone to lycanthropy, which manifests itself at puberty. However, Bill-E is later revealed to be the real werewolf, though he doesn't know it himself. Dervish later explains that Bill-E is Grubbs' half-brother from one of his father's affairs. The only way to cure him is by winning three out of five simultaneous chess games with the powerfully magical demon master Lord Loss while another person battles his familiars. Neither one is permitted to fail. This is also revealed to be the reason his family was killed, when his sister Gret also succumbed to the family curse. Meera Flame, a friend of Dervish, who is knocked out while trying to restrain a transformed Bill-E, was supposed to help battle the demons. Dervish convinces an extremely reluctant Grubbs, who is still haunted by nightmares, to take her place. While confronting Lord Loss, Dervish is constantly distracted from his chess match as Grubbs is unable to fight off the two familiars. Dervish finally uses magic to save Grubbs, but Lord Loss sees this as breaking the rules of the game and is about to let his familiars kill Dervish, Grubbs, and Bill-E. However, Dervish is able to convince Lord Loss to let Grubbs finish the chess game, while he battles the familiars. A terrified Grubbs then makes a bad game worse. Then Grubbs realizes that Lord Loss is feeding on his despair and then decides to play with an aloof attitude. This throws Lord Loss' concentration, allowing Grubbs to win the game. Lord Loss then cures Bill-E, but someone must battle him in his realm. Grubbs offers to go, but Dervish refuses to let Grubbs fight and goes instead. Dervish leaves to the Demonata universe, leaving Grubbs behind with Bill-E. Grubbs lies to Bill-E, telling him that Dervish used a calming spell to try to cure his lycanthropy. Grubbs figures that it's better for Bill-E to believe that Dervish is his father, since his real father is dead. Fourteen months later Grubbs has been caring for Dervish in his zombie-like state, also dealing with the fear that he'll turn into a werewolf. One morning, Grubbs wakes up to find blood under his nails and hair in his teeth. Thinking that he has turned, he prepares to call the mysterious Lambs Dervish told him about, to kill him before he does any harm. As Grubbs reaches for the phone he hears someone call his name. Turning to look he sees Dervish, with his senses regained, holding a tin of paint and a woollen scarf. The book ends with Dervish saying, "The look on your face!" |
The Nun in her Smock | null | null | Venus in the Cloister is made up of five dialogues, all of them carried out between Sister Agnes and Sister Angelica. The entire story can be considered as a “whore dialogue” The dialogue begins when Sister Agnes is caught in the act of masturbating by the older and wiser nun Sister Angelica. She is embarrassed and taken aback while Sister Angelica appears to be quite unaffected by what she has just witnessed. Agnes: Ah Lud! Sister Angelica, for heaven’s Sake, do not come into our Cell; I am not visible at present. Ought you to surprise people in the condition I am in? I thought I had shut the door. Angelica: Be quiet, my dear, what is it gives thee this Alarm? The mighty Crime of seeing the shift thy self, or doing (something) somewhat more refreshing? Good friends ought to conceal nothing from one another. Sit down again upon the Mattress, I’ll go and shut the Door. What follows is an attempt by Sister Angelica to seduce the younger nun. Sister Agnes is discomfited to have been caught by the older nun and so she meekly protests against Sister Angelica’s sexual attempts. Agnes: Ah Lud! how you squeeze me in your Arms ; Don’t you see I am naked to my Smock? Ah! you have set me all on Fire. However Angelica knows that her seduction will remain incomplete if the younger nun’s philosophical thought process remains unchanged. So she promises Agnes teachings of a new kind of religion in which there is little room for self denial and more scope for “informed Judgment”. Angelica then proceeds to mentions Reverend Father Jesuit who helped open her mind to such new types of religious speculations and debate. The father talks of Religion in terms of two distinct bodies--"one of which is purely celestial and supernatural, the other terrestrial and corruptible, which is only the invention of Men". The second body is termed as Policy which tends to destroy inner peace. Angelica decides to explore the different designs of the “Policy” in putting up such elaborate rules to be followed. The following speech on Policy given by Sister Angelica becomes essential in establishing the sex scenes that follow. Policy, which cannot suffer any Thing defective in the State, seeing the Increase of these Recluses, their Disorder and Irregularity, was obliged to make use of its Power ... It had a Mind to rid it self entirely of those Leaches, who through laziness and horrible sloath, would live on the Labour of poor People; but this Buckler of Religion with which they cover themselves, and the Judgment of the Vulgar, of which they had already made themselves Masters, gave Things another Turn; so that these Communities were not entirely unuseful to the Commonwealth. Policy, then looked upon these Houses so many Common-Sewers, into which it might disperse it self of its Superfluities; it makes use of them to ease Families, whom a great Number of Children would make poor and indigent, if there were not Places for them to retire to; and that their Retreat many be secure, without any Hopes of Return, it invented Vows, by which it pretends to bind us, and tye us indissolubly, to that State which we have embraced: It makes us even renounce the Rights which nature has given us, and separate us from the World in such Manner, that we make no part of it. What follows is a process of exploration of the sexual desires of both the nuns. While Angelica imparts her knowledge, Sister Agnes carefully acts the part of the younger nun who tries to escape seduction but fails in the attempt. Agnes submits to being in a sense of "Confusion" and she is embarrassed to let the older nun see her body. This also relates to the fact that Agnes has not completely accepted the religious and philosophical deliberations of the older nun. Gradually as she starts accepting the truth of her own body and sexuality she will finally be free from her old biases. |
An Equal Music: A Novel | Vikram Seth | 1,999 | The plot concerns Michael, a professional violinist, who never forgot his love for Julia, a pianist he met as a student in Vienna. They meet again after a decade, and conduct a secret affair, though she is married and has one child. Their musical careers are affected by this affair and the knowledge that Julia is going deaf. |
Predator | Patricia Cornwell | 2,005 | Dr. Kay Scarpetta, now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida, takes charge of a case that stretches from steamy Florida to snowbound Massachusetts, one as unnerving as any she has ever faced. The teasing psychological clues lead Scarpetta and her team—Pete Marino, Benton Wesley, and Lucy Farinelli—to suspect that they are hunting someone with a cunning and malevolent mind whose secrets have kept them in the shadows, until now. |
Berenice | Edgar Allan Poe | 1,835 | The narrator, Egaeus, is a studious young man who grows up in a large gloomy mansion with his cousin Berenice. He suffers from a type of obsessive disorder, a monomania that makes him fixate on objects. She, originally beautiful, suffers from some unspecified degenerative illness, with periods of catalepsy a particular symptom, which he refers to as a trance. Nevertheless, they are due to be married. One afternoon, Egaeus sees Berenice as he sits in the library. When she smiles, he focuses on her teeth. His obsession grips him, and for days he drifts in and out of awareness, constantly thinking about the teeth. He imagines himself holding the teeth and turning them over to examine them from all angles. At one point a servant tells him that Berenice has died and shall be buried. When he next becomes aware, with an inexplicable terror, he finds a lamp and a small box in front of him. Another servant enters, reporting that a grave has been violated, and a shrouded disfigured body found, still alive. Egaeus finds his clothes are covered in mud and blood, and opens the box to find it contains dental instruments and "thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances" – Berenice's teeth. The Latin epigraph, "Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas," at the head of the text may be translated as: "My companion said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might somewhat alleviate my worries." This quote is also seen by Egaeus in an open book towards the end of the story. |
The Pushcart War | null | null | The opening sentence says,"The Pushcart War started on the afternoon of March 15, 1976 when a truck ran down a pushcart belonging to a flower peddler." Later editions changed 1976 to 1986 then to 1998 so that the date would still be set in the future. Post-millennium editions of the book have been published with the date 2029. Traffic in New York City has become intolerable. The leaders of the three biggest trucking companies, known as "The Three," hold a secret meeting where they plan to take over the streets for themselves by eliminating other traffic, starting with the pushcarts.The character Professor Cumberly says, "The truck drivers had gotten together and figured out that in crowded traffic conditions, the only way to get where you wanted to go was to be so big that you didn't have to get out of the way of anybody." This is known as the Large Object Theory of History. Faced with truck-related "accidents," damaged carts, and injured fellows, the pushcart peddlers respond with the Pea-Shooter Campaign. The aim is to flatten truck tires using pea shooters with pins in the peas so that everyone can see that the trucks are the cause of the traffic problems. One peddler, Frank the Flower, is arrested and falsely confesses that he shot all 18,991 of the trucks. After his arrest, the peddlers give up the Pea-Shooter Campaign. But soon, inspired by Frank's arrest, children join in the sabotage of truck tires. The movie star, Wenda Gambling, also comes out in support of the peddlers. On the truck side are the owners Moe Mammoth of Mammoth Moving, Walter Sweet of Tiger Trucking, and Louie Livergreen of LEMA (Lower Eastside Moving Association). Their biggest trucks are respectively the Mighty Mammoth, the Ten-Ton Tiger and the Leaping Lema. Their most prominent driver is Albert P. Mack. A driver for Tiger Trucking is Joey Kafflis and he gets fired for saying that traffic is lousy and that he is standing up for the pushcarts instead of the trucks. Prominent peddlers are Frank the Flower, Morris the Florist, General Anna, Harry the Hot Dog, Mr. Jerusalem, Carlos, Papa Peretz, Eddie Moroney and the pushcart repair shop owner Maxie Hammerman, the "Pushcart King." Initially, the outlook is bad for the peddlers because the trucking companies control the newspapers and the corrupt mayor, Emmett P. Cudd, but the citizens of New York City and the members of the press eventually move to the side of the street vendors after the peddlers' Peace March is interrupted by violence on the part of the truck drivers. New laws are enacted to limit the size of the trucks to the current smallest size or smaller and to limit the number of trucks to one half of the current number. The Truce is passed to make it a criminal offense for a larger vehicle to take advantage of a smaller vehicle in any way. Albert P. Mack is sentenced to life in prison for violating the Truce nineteen times. The city erects a statue of General Anna to commemorate the struggle. |
The Perilous Road | William O. Steele | 1,958 | Chris Brabson is a boy whose family lives in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War. His family encounters hard times when cavalry soldiers of the Union Army come and take most of his family's food and their one and only plow horse leaving them little supplies to sustain the winter. Chris vowes to get even with the Yanks and is determined to fight for Confederate Army. Chris' brother, Jethro, has just recently joined the Union Army forcing Chris to examine his beliefs of war, courage, and tolerance. Jethro's enlistment causes the Brabson family to be the victims of prejudice from their neighbors who are sympathizers of the Confederate Army. The neighbors become intolerant of their beliefs and burn down their shed and threaten to do the same with their house. Though Jethro is a Union soldier, Chris hates the Union troops. When Chris finds out that there is a wagon train in the area he alerts a friend of his, Silas Agee, who claims to be a Confederate spy. It is only after he tells Silas about the wagon train that he finds out that his brother's job in the Army will be as a wagon driver. Chris then takes it upon himself to go tell his brother of the fact that the Confederates have been alerted about the wagon train in order to try to save Jethro's life. When he gets to the wagon train in search of Jethro, he is kindly greeted by Union troops who offer him food and conversation. He begins to change his perspective of the Yankees learning that they are very different from him and are not the hateful thieves he once viewed them as. |
Hannibal's Children | John Maddox Roberts | 2,002 | The novel opens at the alternate close of the Second Punic War. Hannibal offers terms to the Romans: abandon your city and move north of the Alps, or be destroyed. The Romans, under the dictator Q. Fabius Maximus, accept the offer and withdraw into Germania, vowing to return. The Carthaginians declare victory and go home. One chapter and several generations later, the Romans have long since reestablished their republic. These Romans, largely out of need, have adopted a practice of Cultural Romanization more pronounced than the historical Romans did: large numbers of Germans have been adopted into the Roman society, forming a large proportion of both the legions and the Senate. A series of auspicious omens prompt the Senate to send a delegation south into Latium. The expedition leaders are subtly but immediately at cross purposes: the commander, Marcus Scipio, a scion of the ancient patrician Cornelii Scipiones family, is wholly motivated by a desire to reestablish the Republic in the Mediterranean basin. His deputy, Titus Norbanus, one of the newer, Germanic Romans, seeks personal glory, at least in part to ensure that the Germans (particularly his own family) remain as powerful within the expanded Republic as they do under the current scheme. It quickly becomes clear to the Romans that generations of constant warfare in Germania have strengthened them, whereas the Carthaginians have grown soft in the absence of real opposition. The Republic quickly begins playing the Carthaginians off against the Egyptians (the only other serious power in the Mediterranean), reclaiming Latium in the process. At the close of the novel, the Egyptian army led by Scipio vanquishes the Carthaginian force, in which four Roman legions led by Norbanus are technically serving. The sequel follows Norbanus's trek back to friendly territory and his march towards power. |
The Wheel on the School | Meindert DeJong | 1,954 | Lina Sendak is one of six school children in the small fishing village of Shora. When she writes an essay for school that asks why there are no storks in their village, the teacher encourages the class to find out for themselves. They discover that the roofs on the village's homes are pitched so steeply that the storks cannot find space to nest on the sharp ridges, and placing a wagon wheel on each roof ridge would give storks a place to nest. The task of finding a wagon wheel in the tiny village proves difficult, and the children meet several interesting personalities during their search. This simple, yet compelling plot teaches that if people think and wonder why, things will begin to happen and dreams will come true. The schoolchildren are: Lina, the only girl in the small school; Jella, the biggest of all the children; Auka, an average boy; Eelka, who is fat and awkward; and Pier and Dirk, the inseparable twins. These six kids are aided by their teacher, Grandmother Sibble III, legless Janus, old Douwa, and the "tin man". Other characters include the fathers of the children, who are all fishermen; Lina's aunt, who lives in Nes; Evert, the man living across from Lina's aunt; Lina and Auka's younger siblings, Linda and Jan; Jana, Janus's wife; and the mothers of the children. The dedication reads: "To my nieces, Shirley and Beverly, and their flying fingers". |
Doctor Sax | Jack Kerouac | null | The novel begins with Jackie Duluoz, based on Kerouac himself, relating a dream in which he finds himself in Lowell, Massachusetts, his childhood home town. Prompted by this dream, he recollects the story of his childhood of warm browns and sepia tones, along with his shrouded childhood fantasies, which have become inextricable from the memories. The fantasies pertain to a castle in Lowell atop a muted green hill that Jackie calls Snake Hill. Underneath the misty grey castle, the Great World Snake sleeps. Various vampires, monsters, gnomes, werewolves, and dark magicians from all over the world gather to the mansion with the intention of awakening the Snake so that it will devour the entire world (although a small minority of them, derisively called "Dovists," believe that the Snake is merely "a husk of doves," and when it awakens it will burst open, releasing thousands of lace white doves. This myth is also present in a story told by Kerouac's character, Sal Paradise, in On the Road). The eponymous Doctor Sax, also part of Jackie's fantasy world, is a dark but ultimately friendly figure with a shrouded black cape, an inky black slouch hat, a haunting laugh, and a "disease of the night" called Visagus Nightsoil that causes his skin to turn mossy green at night. Sax, who also came to Lowell because of the Great World Snake, lives in the forest in the neighboring town of Dracut, where he conducts various alchemical experiments, attempting to concoct a potion to destroy the Snake when it awakens. When the Snake is finally awakened, Doctor Sax uses his potion on the Snake, but the potion fails to do any damage. Sax, defeated, discards his shadowy black costume and watches the events unfold as an ordinary man. As the Snake prepares to destroy the world, all seems lost until an enormous night colored bird, an ancient counterpart of the Snake, suddenly appears. Seizing the Snake in its beak, the bird flies upward into the heartbreakingly blue sky until it vanishes from view, leading the amazed Sax to muse, "I'll be damned, the universe disposes of its own evil!" |
City of Pearl | Karen Traviss | 2,004 | On Planet Earth, Superintendent Shan Frankland (A hardened, self-sufficient, and brutally honest female cop) is preparing for retirement when she is confronted by politician Eugenie Perault, who recruits Shan to lead a top-secret mission into outer space on a ship named the Thetis. Her destination is Cavanagh's Star; a planet hundreds of light years away, but with an atmosphere strikingly similar to that of Earth. However, rather than risk exposure of the classified information Shan will need to carry out the unknown mission, Perault gives Shan a Suppressed Briefing (SB), which installs the information into Shan's subconscious mind, only to be brought forth when circumstances call for it. Knowing only that she was preceded on this journey by a colonist group named Constantine (who have never been heard from again), and that the time in speed-of-light travel will amount to 75 years on Earth but only months for her ship, Shan sets off in command of a mix-matched group of specialized civilians (called the "payload") anxious to use the planet for their own gain, and competing for control with Commander Lindsay Neville, the independent leader of a small force of marines. When Shan and the Thetis crew reach Cavanagh's Star, however, they have big surprises ahead of them. Not only do they find Constantine alive and thriving as a religious colony within a carefully controlled biosphere designed to grow crops brought from Earth, but they also discover a unique and complex environment of alien plants and animals, including such species as the scavenger rock velvets, and the bog-dwelling predator shevens. The civilian scientists are itching to take samples and compile medical information. But the small band of humans soon learns that the planet isn't theirs to claim. Two unique alien races inhabit Cavanagh's Star; the water-dwelling, squid-like Bezeri, and the bipedal Wess'har. The Wess'har, who originate from Wess'ej, the planet's moon, are strong environmentalists who see each species as an intelligent race; they are extreme vegans, and take pride in the fact that their architecture is subterranean and unobtrusive. For centuries, they have protected Cavanagh's Star and the Bezeri from the Isenj - a third alien race who once attempted to colonize the planet. When the pollution from Isenj cities which they had built on the planet got so bad that it was killing Bezeri by the millions, the Wess'har stepped in. Now, not a single trace of the enormous Isenj civilization can be found on the planet - a stunning example to Shan's crew of what the Wess'har military is capable of. On the planet, Shan meets Josh Garrod - the Christian leader of Constantine - who explains to her the ways of the Constantine people. They live in a hardworking, god-oriented society in which crime is almost non-existent and technology is kept to a minimum. Josh is in contact with the Wess'har (mainly through a representative named Aras) and follows their orders compliantly, knowing that the Wess'har could obliterate Constantine at any time, should they so wish. According to the agreement between Shan and the Wess'har (made through Josh), the Thetis has been allowed to land and to make camp within the boundaries of Constantine. However, both Constantine and the Wess'har are wary of the Thetis and its intentions. The crew is permitted to explore the planet (with Wess'har or Constantine guides) but are given one ultimate rule: no samples. The Thetis must leave nothing and take nothing - and that means no scientific samples. Shan's crew grumbles at the arrangement, and some resolve not to heed the warnings given to them. Through Josh, Shan eventually comes in contact with Aras, the Wess'har representative and protector of the Constantine colony. However, Aras is not a normal Wess'har, nor does he even look like one, though Shan does not yet know this. He used to be completely Wess'har, but his appearance, along with many of his attributes, had altered since he had been infected with a disease unknown to humankind. This "disease," called c'nataat, is actually a symbiotic creature which uses genetic information from previous hosts and ingested materials to alter its current host's genetics to fit its own needs. Though in many ways it had made Aras more efficient (it gives him an indefinite lifespan, and allows him to hold his breath under water for extended periods of time), the disease, which is transferable by touch, has cut him off from everyone he knows and left him suspended in time as his friends and family slowly die off. When Shan learns about his trouble - and touches Aras for the first time in 170 years - a bond begins to form between the two of them. In the mean time, within the Thetis crew, issues are rising. Shan must fight for the power and respect she requires to run her mission; the "payload" scientists are angry at the restrictions placed on them, and Commander Neville is sore at her lack of power as only second in command. However, Shan and Neville learn to work together as the anger of the payload increases and Neville discovers she has yet another issue on her hands - an unplanned pregnancy has occurred from a hookup just days before the launch of the Thetis. Abortion pills are available, but Neville decides to have the baby, despite the fact that medic Hugel tells her it could be complicated. At the same time, Shan begins to get little whispers from her SB, telling her to look for a gene bank that Constantine supposedly possesses. It is a compilation of seeds and embryos from Earthly plants and animals, and rumored to be the largest ever compiled. Also, she keeps thinking the name "Helen," but does not know who this is. |
Tonio Kröger | Thomas Mann | 1,903 | The narrative follows the course of a man's life from his schoolboy days to his adulthood. The son of a north German merchant and an Italian artist, Tonio inherited qualities from both sides of his family. As a child, he experiences conflicting feelings for the bourgeois people around him. He feels both superior to them in his insights and envious of their innocent vitality. This conflict continues into Tonio's adulthood, when he becomes a famous writer living in southern Germany. "To be an artist," he comes to believe, "one has to die to everyday life." These issues are only partially resolved when Tonio travels north to visit his hometown. While there, Tonio is mistaken for an escaped criminal, thereby reinforcing his inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to "respectable" society. As Erich Heller –who knew Thomas Mann personally– observed, Tonio Kröger’s theme is that of the "artist as an exile from reality" (with Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (1790) and Grillparzer’s Sappho (1818) for company). Yet it was also Erich Heller who, earlier, in his own youth, had diagnosed the main theme of Tonio Kröger to be the infatuation and entanglements of a passionate heart, destined to give shape to, intellectualize, its feelings in artistic terms. |
The Faction War | Monte Cook | null | The culmination of several adventures leading up to that point, The Faction War brought an end to the factions' control of the city. Instigated by the power-hungry Duke Rowan Darkwood, factol of the Fated, in a bid to dethrone the Lady of Pain and rule Sigil himself, the war spread throughout the city before the Lady of Pain, with the aid of a group of adventurers (the players' characters), intervened. |
The Joiner King | Troy Denning | null | Six years after the Yuuzhan Vong War ended, all of the survivors of the Mission to Myrkr back in Star by Star, except for Hapan Queen Mother Tenel Ka Djo, respond to a call through the Force. They all leave their current posts and travel into the Unknown Regions. After this happens, an envoy from the Chiss Ascendancy, Mitt'swe'kleoni (Tswek for short), comes to the Jedi Masters' Council on Coruscant to file a complaint. He asks why the Jedi Knights are involved in a border dispute with an enemy of the Chiss who Tswek refuses to give the name for. None of the Masters give an answer, but Luke Skywalker agrees to look into it. He takes his wife Mara, their son Ben, and Saba Sebatyne into the Unknown Regions in order to learn what the Knights are up to. When Han and Leia Organa Solo discover this, they join the Skywalkers and Saba in their journey after they rendezvous inside an insect-like hive in space, which is filled with beings from all over the galaxy, along with strange insect beings. The Skywalkers, Solos, and Saba all meet up with Captain Jae Juun and his rude copilot Tarfang, who agree to take the group to the planet Yoggoy, where they will be able to find the Jedi Knights. On Yoggoy, instead of meeting any of the Jedi Knights, the Skywalkers, the Solos, and Saba all meet up with the leader of the strange insect beings that populate the world of Yoggoy, UnuThul. As it turns out, UnuThul is the badly burned and psychologically scarred Raynar Thul, a Jedi Knight who was taken by the Dark Jedi Lomi Plo and Welk during the Mission to Myrkr. UnuThul reveals that the ship that Plo and Welk took him in had crashed onto the surface of Yoggoy while the Yuuzhan Vong War was still commencing, and the insect beings who now call themselves the Colony took Raynar in to repair his badly burned form to the best of their abilities. A side effect of being with those of the Colony is that they eventually become part of their hive mind. Due to Raynar's Force-sensitivity, however, he had accumulated such power that he actually become the leader of the Colony, and he helped them expand their territory from Yoggoy. When asked about what happened to Lomi Plo and Welk, Raynar tells the group that he has never even heard of them before. Afterwards, as the Skywalkers, the Solos, and Saba find evidence that the Colony is really the long-lost species of the Killiks, the clan is attacked by dark blue Killiks. They survive the attack and confront UnuThul about the matter, who denies any knowledge about it. Regardless, the Skywalker-Solo-Sebatyne clan leave Yoggoy for Qoribu, where the Jedi Knights are fighting alongside the Killiks against the Chiss. Leia figured this out because when the clan visited the crash site of the ship that brought Raynar to Yoggoy, she saw a vision of her son, Jacen, telling her this information. As it is, Jacen had previously visited the Yoggoy crash site and had a vision of his mother visiting the crash site, and he decided to tell the vision where the Killiks and Jedi were fighting the Chiss. At Qoribu, where the Skywalker-Solo-Sebatyne clan plan to confront the Knights, they are once again attacked by the mysterious blue-black Killiks. They once again survive the attack, and they confront the Knights as expected on Qoribu's moon of Jwlio. From this, they come to an agreement: some of the Knights will stay behind in order to save Lowbacca from Chiss captivity, as he was lost in the previous battle against the Ascendancy. Jaina and Zekk are the ones who stay behind, but strangely enough, they don't sense Alema Rar's intent to come with Han and Leia back to Ossus. This prompts suspicion from Han and Leia just as Saba gets into a fight with a mysterious figure who is no doubt Welk. Saba is injured thanks to Welk and a couple of his blue-black Killik assistants, and she is knocked into a coma as a result. Before she was knocked out, however, she was able to discern that the remaining Killik who attacked her went to the Skywalkers' ship, the Jade Shadow. The Millennium Falcon takes a wounded Saba and a suspicious Alema back to Ossus. Ben gets in trouble by Mara for eating too much gelmeat. In Ben's defense, he says that it was really his new Killik friend who did it, which Mara takes to be a lie. Meanwhile, Luke looks into R2-D2's systems in order to find out what the cause of the strange malfunctions that the astromech droid has been suffering. Luke finds a recording of his father talking to a mysterious woman, which R2-D2 denies any knowledge about. Luke becomes suspicious of R2-D2's motives after this. As the Millennium Falcon travels back to Ossus with Alema and Saba, Leia subtly interrogates Alema in order to understand what she is really up to. When Alema refers to herself as "we," the conversation awkwardly ends on Alema's part, and Leia knows that something more is going on. Later, after the Falcon undergoes a mysterious malfunction in hyperspace that was no doubt caused by Alema, they end up in an unnamed nebula and land on a planet full of plant life that, strangely, has no animal or insect life on it. When Leia and Alema go to repair the Falcon, Alema betrays her and everyone else on the ship, as Leia suspected, and she fights Leia and her Noghri bodyguards, Cakhmaim and Meewalh. Although Alema is able to defeat the Noghri, Han is the one who defeats Alema by activating an escape pod that knocks her unconscious. Later, after the Falcon is repaired, they take an imprisoned Alema the rest of the way back to Ossus. On Ossus, the Jedi Knights are tested for the hive mind that shared with the Killiks as Luke and Mara meet with a representative from the Chiss, Chaf'orm'bintrano (Formbi for short), in order to clarify the conflict between the Ascendency and the Colony. Formbi explains that the war between the Killiks and the Chiss goes beyond that of the border conflict, and was even somewhat responsible for the plot against the Fel family back in Force Heretic II: Refugee. Then, after Saba is healed from the injuries she sustained in her fight with Welk, Mara is quickly informed that there is indeed a blue-black Killik that had sneaked aboard the Jade Shadow. Realizing that Ben wasn't lying about the gelmeat, Mara rushes to her son's room and fights the Killik infiltrator. She defeats it, and has it tested along with Alema and the Knights. Alema and the Killik have the strongest connection, as the other Knights don't seem to feel what Alema and the Killik feel. Jedi Master and medical healer Cilghal concludes from this blue-black Killik, whose nest is of the Gorog as it turns out, that it and Alema are part of an unconscious nest among the Colony; this explains why UnuThul was unable to explain their presences. It wasn't because he lied about them, but rather, it was because he was unaware of their existence. Meanwhile, computer slicer Zakarisz Ghent accesses more of R2-D2's memory files and finds another recording of Anakin Skywalker talking to the mysterious woman that has to be his wife, and therefore, is Luke and Leia's mother. They, along with their friends and family, find the time to watch the newly found footage. Back to the main plot, the Jedi Knights are able to sneak out of their captivity and elicit the help of other allies in order to help the Killiks fight the Chiss. Tesar Sebatyne enlists the help of Raynar's mother, Aryn, while Jacen seeks out the help from Tenel Ka Djo. Tenel Ka reveals that she was able to withstand UnuThul's call through the Force by locking herself in her room until the call passed, as she couldn't leave her duties as Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium. Tenel Ka agrees to lend the Killiks the assistance of the Hapan fleet if Jacen will agree to sleep with her. Jacen complies, and so does Tenel Ka. The Jedi on Ossus hypothesize a way to get rid of the Gorog, which they nickname the Dark Nest (hence, the title of the trilogy). They put tracking beacons on all of the ships on the Academy's hangar bay and have Alema and her fellow Gorog take one to return to the Dark Nest's base. They follow Alema and the Gorog back into the Qoribu as the Killiks and their new allies engage in an all-out battle against the Chiss forces. Luke and Mara follow Alema and her Gorog friend down to Qoribu's moon of Kr, and they battle off and kill and wound many of the Dark Nest before they confront Alema and Welk. Mara is wounded in combat, but she survives a suicide bombing from the Gorog she fought on Ossus by putting a Force shield around herself. Amidst the smoke cloud that followed the explosion, Mara saw a mysterious image lurking there. Alema escapes the conflict, though severely wounded. Meanwhile, Luke ends up in a one-on-one lightsaber duel against Welk. Though both put up a good fight, it is inevitably Luke who wins and ends Welk's life. Soon, all of the other Gorog on Kr are killed by the Skywalkers' backup forces, and the Battles of Qoribu and Kr end. UnuThul investigates the bodies of the Gorog, and they find Dark Nest cells filled with Chiss captives that are being used for Gorog offspring. This explains both the Dark Nest's motivation for going to war against the Killiks, as well as why the Chiss were going against the Colony. UnuThul agrees to let the Chiss have Qoribu, and the Hapans help the Killiks relocate to the unnamed nebula that the Solos found before Alema was revealed as a traitor. The Chiss return Lowbacca back to the Jedi, and UnuThul separates his fellow Knights from the rest of the Killik hive mind, their purpose in defending the Colony now over. Jaina and Zekk, however, due to their extensive time with each other, have an unbreakable hive mind with each other, which makes it awkward when it comes to Jaina's relationship with Jagged Fel. |
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant | Anne Tyler | 1,982 | Pearl Tull is a rigid perfectionist. She has 3 children with her husband, traveling salesman Beck, who abandons the family. After Beck leaves, Pearl struggles to maintain a front as if nothing is wrong. Cody, the oldest, is wild and adventurous, but is envious of his brother Ezra, whom he believes is Pearl's favorite. As they grow up, this plays out in endless pranks. Ezra is passive, and never tries to get back at Cody. He is nurturing and sweet, traits that often interest Cody's girlfriends, furthering Cody's resentment. Ezra goes to work at a restaurant, which he later manages and ultimately inherits, while Cody becomes a wealthy and successful efficiency expert. When Ezra becomes engaged to Ruth, his star cook, Cody becomes obsessed with luring her away, and ultimately succeeds, but his marriage to Ruth is not easy. Ezra never recovers, and remains at home with Pearl; he is a caregiver, both for Pearl and his customers, but this is underlain by sadness. Jenny is the third child and the most scholarly of the Tulls, but in college, she marries on an impulse with unhappy results. Only in her third marriage to a man with 6 children whose wife has abandoned him does she find stability in family life and in her successful, if harried, career as a pediatrician. A recurring scene in the novel involves Ezra's unsuccessful attempts to bring the family together for a meal at his "Homesick Restaurant", reflecting his desire to unite and mend the family. At Pearl's funeral, Beck returns to the family for the first time. However, they never seem to be able to get through a single dinner without conflict, this time with Cody facing down his father. |
The Sicilian | Mario Puzo | 1,984 | The novel opens in 1950 Sicily, where Michael Corleone, nearing the end of his exile in Sicily, meets with Don Croce Malo, the Capo di Capi or Boss of bosses in Sicily, his brother, Father Benjamino Malo, Stefan Andolini (redheaded cousin of Don Vito Corleone), and Sicilian Inspector Frederico Velardi. They discuss with Michael the details of his father's agreement to allow Michael to usher the bandit Salvatore "Turi" Guiliano out of Sicily and to America. Michael is told of a "testament", a set of documents Guiliano has composed that would be damning to certain political officials of the Italian government if released. Michael is taken to Guiliano's house where he meets Turi's parents and Gaspare "Aspanu" Pisciotta, Guiliano's second in command. Michael is informed that Turi's pregnant fiancée is heading to America first, ahead of Guiliano, and only when she sends word back that she is safe, will Turi leave for America. Michael is also told he is to be entrusted with Guiliano's testament. Maria Lombardo Guiliano gives Michael a negro statue of the Virgin Mary as a gift as he parts. The bulk of the novel focuses on the life of Salvatore Guiliano and how he rose to his legendary status as a bandit and hero to the Sicilian people. He was born in the village of Montelepre, west of Palermo. His godfather, Hector Adonis, a small man tormented his entire life for his small stature, was a professor of history and literature at the University of Palermo. He is a very close personal friend of the Guiliano family, a mentor for Turi, and a man who caters to the Friends of the Friends (the word Mafia is rarely spoken in Sicily). In September 1943, the town of Montelepre was preparing for its annual festa for its town's patron saint. Montelepre was a very poor town, and in this period, food was very scarce and often had to be purchased on the black market because of the strict rationing laws that starved the people of Sicily. In reality, all food that was given to the government storehouses was appropriated by the Mafia chiefs and sold on the black market for the citizens to buy; the people of Sicily had to break the law in order to eat. Black market laws were rarely enforced, but smuggling was another matter. On a September morning in 1943, Turi Giuilano and his best friend Aspanu Pisciotta travelled to the nearby town of Corleone to procure some food for his sister's engagement party. On the way back, they were stopped by the carabinieri, and decided to take them on, for the food was too valuable. Turi was shot, but he also managed to shoot his attacker, a police Sergeant, through the eye. Turi was carried by Aspanu to a local monastery, where he was taken care of by the monks there, helped by the Abbot Manfredi, a close friend of Aspanu. Here he was nursed back to health, and Aspanu Pisciotta developed his undying loyalty to Turi. Leaving the monastery, he and Aspanu made their way back to Guiliano's home in Montelepre, knowing he was still being sought for the murder of the Sergeant. While he was discussing his future with his parents and close family friends, Aspanu is informed that the Maresciallo of the local police force was on his way over to arrest Turi. Turi and Aspanu flee down the Via Bella of their town, and enter the church. They open fire on the jeeps pursuing them, and although it was not intended, kill some of the soldiers pursuing them. They flee to the Cammaratta Mountains. Turi and Aspanu are met by Turi's godfather Hector Adonis, who tries to dissuade them of the path they are headed on toward banditry. Though Turi deeply respects and loves his godfather, he can not be dissuaded. They decide to free the prisoners of Montelepre, unjustly jailed in the nearby Bellampo Barracks. Turi narrowly escapes death at the hands of the Corporal Canio Silvestro whose pistol fails when he points it at Turi's head. Silvestro then, at the mercy of Guiliano, is spared in an act of mercy, and Turi frees the captives, including two men named Passatempo and Terranova, who join Turi's band. Guiliano at this point, is beginning to become famous in the news throughout Italy. Not soon after daringly robbing the home of a local duke, the Corporal Canio Silvestro, disgraced by his military, asks to join Guiliano's band. Though suspecting him of being a spy, they allow him to join. They test his loyalty by asking him to execute Montelepre's Frisella, the barber, who has informed on Guiliano. Silvestro completes this task, proving his loyalty, and they attach a letter to his body that said "So die all who betray Guiliano". Guiliano had now solidified his domination of the entire northwest corner of the island. He was legendary throughout Sicily, and children concluded their prayers at night saying, "...and please save Guiliano from the Carabinieri". Guiliano next orchestrated a kidnapping of Prince Ollorto. The prince was taken, and was treated with the utmost respect and dignity, and his ransom was paid by Don Croce Malo, who had normally been paid for protection by the Prince. It was in this that Guiliano finally came into fierce opposition with Don Croce. The assassination attempts on Guiliano increased, but he evaded them all, suspicious of all who came into contact with him. One of his would-be assassins is found to be Stefan Andolini, who is spared only through Abbot Manfredi, his father, to whom Guiliano owed a favor. Andolini joins Turi's band. The book now fast-forwards back to 1950. In Trapani, Michael Corleone is met by Pete Clemenza, who is to help orchestrate Guiliano's escape. Michael meets Justina, Guiliano's fiancée, and Hector Adonis. Justina leaves for America. Hector informs Michael that Guiliano's elusive and damning Testament is hidden in the black statue of the Virgin Mary that Turi's mother gave him. Back in 1947, Don Croce Malo was strongly aligned with the Christian Democratic party, and driven to keep that party in power, and to deny power to the up and coming Socialist parties that would surely strip him, and the other Mafia chiefs, of their power in Sicily. Don Croce along with Italy's Minister of Justice Franco Trezza, draw up plans to mount a great offensive against Guiliano, but intend to use these plans to blackmail Guiliano to use his influence to swing the upcoming election for the Christian Democrats. Guiliano, who was a man of God and hated the Socialists, ultimately accepts these terms, and helps the campaign across Western Sicily. The 1948 election was a disaster for the Christian Democrats. The Socialists picked up many seats. A celebration was to take place on May Day to celebrate their victories in the Italian legislature by the people of the towns of Piani dei Greci and San Giuseppe Jato. The two towns would parade up mountain passes and converge at a plain called the Portella della Ginestra. Guiliano agreed to suppress this festival, giving his two leaders in this operation, Passatempo and Terranova, orders to "shoot over their heads". Passatempo's men end up shooting too low, and massacre many people, including many women and children. The massacre proved devastating for Guiliano's image in Sicily. Guiliano discovers later that Passatempo had been paid off by Don Croce to shoot the paraders. Guiliano executed him while on his honeymoon with Justina. Guiliano can now feel that his time as a bandit is coming to an end. He stages one final daring move against the aristocracy and corrupt Mafia chiefs. Six mafia chiefs had been summoned to the estate of Prince Ollorto, defending it from the local peasantry who desired to lease land from him, as a new Italian law had recently allowed them to. Guiliano and his band surrounded the estate and executed each one of these chiefs. Guiliano then snuck into Palermo, and kidnapped a Cardinal, the highest Catholic authority in Sicily. The Church instantly paid the ransom. The Minister of Justice Trezza could no longer hold back his plans to assemble a large force in Sicily to take down Guiliano. Part of the force comes to the island from the mainland, and immediately arrests Guiliano's parents and many citizens of Montelepre for conspiring with Turi. In retaliation, Turi robs the heavily armed and guarded pay truck that was responsible for paying all the Carabinieri stationed in Sicily. He is successful, and the Commander of the operation immediately calls for the rest of the reserve force to come to the mainland to combat Guiliano. The plan to escort Guiliano to America is set into motion, and Aspanu Pisciotta meets with Michael Corleone. He gives the details on precisely where to intercept him and Guiliano. The next day, Clemenza and Michael head down the road toward Palermo, and are stopped by a huge traffic jam. They learn that up ahead Turi Guiliano has been killed by the Carabinieri. They move into town and eat at a cafe, hearing the news of Guiliano's death on the lips of every person in town. They are then discovered and arrested by the Inspector Velardi. They are later released after Don Croce Malo vouches for them, and organizes their release. They return to America. Though the news is that he was killed by the Carabinieri, Guiliano's father, however swears a vendetta on Aspanu Pisciotta. Pisciotta betrayed Guiliano to Don Croce Malo and the Carabinieri because he was fearing his actions were becoming suicidal. He committed grievous offenses against the most powerful in Sicily and feared the end was near. It was Pisiciotta who had killed Guiliano, shooting his hand off in a moment of nervousness, fearing that he would discover he betrayed him. Later, in prison, Pisciotta was poisoned by a joint effort of Don Croce Malo and Hector Adonis. Right after Aspanu's death, Adonis made his way into his cell and left a letter in Pisciotta's pocket reading, "So die all who betray Guiliano". Michael returned home to the Corleone compound in Long Beach. He met with his father in private, and the Don told him that they would not release Guiliano's testament for fear Guiliano's parents would be harmed in retaliation by the Italian government or its Mafia supporters. In this, Don Corleone teaches his son his first lesson: it is better to remain alive and live a fruitful life, than to be dead and a hero. |
Thornyhold | Mary Stewart | 1,988 | The story is about a lonely child, Geillis "Gilly" Ramsey, who is made to see the world through her mother's cousin's (also Geillis — Gilly was named after her) unusual eyes. When the child becomes a young woman, she inherits her dead cousin's house as well as her reputation among the local community as a white witch and herbalist. However, as she finds out, this is no normal community, and worries quickly present themselves. Magical effort is pointed at the attractive and widowed popular writer, Christopher Dryden, who lives in rural isolation with his young son. As Christopher Dryden points out to Gilly, her (and her mother's cousin's) name is that of a real witch, Geillis Duncane, who was tried in Edinburgh in the late 16th century. |
Premalekhanam | Vaikom Muhammad Basheer | 1,943 | A young bank employee, Keshavan Nair, Hindu by religion, Nair by caste lodges on the upper floor of the house belonging to Saramma's father. Saraamma is a Christian by religion, beautiful, young, unmarried, unemployed, happy-go-lucky with a sting on the tip of her tongue. Keshavan Nair is an honest simpleton haplessly in love with her. The book gets its title from the letter that Keshavan Nair composes to reveal to Saramma his love for her. The setting is 1940's Kerala. The story is a sarcastic commentary on the dowry system and is in favour of inter-religious marriage. But this is disguised in a funny love story. Basheer was not a Nair or a Christian, he was a lover of humanity. Saramma is an educated woman, and she is trying to get a job, and she has applied for jobs in many countries( because the story is set in Travancore, which was a country, or princely state). At last she gets a job. The job provider was Keshavan Nair, and the only job assigned to Saramma was to love him!He pays for that too in a monthly basis. Now the serious questions arise. They belong to different religions, then which religion will their children follow? They decides to teach their children every religion and it is up to the children to choose their religion. They plan to grow their children "Religion less". Then comes the other serious issue, How will they name the child? They cannot choose a Hindu name or Christian name, Keshavan Nair asks "Shall we go for Russian names?"Saramma asks "How will it be?" "Anything ending with 'Visky'is a Russian name" Saramma was not happy with it. Keshavan Nair asks "Shall we go for Chinese names like Kwang" Saramma is still not happy. Finally they decides to go with names over objects like sky, sand, Air, toffee, balloon. They finally decide to take a lot of these objects, The result of the lot will be two chits which say "Sky" and "Toffee". They name their child as "Skytoffee". Keshavan Nair shouts saying "Mr.Skytoffee","Skytoffee","Comrade:Skytoffee". Saramma interrupts "Do you want our child to become a communist" Keshavan Nair says "Let him decide on that". The story ends happily. |
The Italian Secretary | Caleb Carr | 2,005 | Architect Sir Alistair Sinclair and his foreman, Dennis McKay, have been slain in the midst of rehabilitating the medieval west tower of the Royal Palace of Holyrood--the very wing where Mary, Queen of Scots, had lived, and where David Rizzio had met his brutal, politically motivated end. Mycroft Holmes fears these murders portend new threats against Britain's present monarch—the elderly Queen Victoria, who infrequently lodges at the palace—by a known assassin, perhaps in nefarious league with the German Kaiser. En route north, Holmes and Watson are menaced aboard their train by a red-bearded bomb thrower (supposedly a rabid Scots nationalist), only to discover that still greater dangers await them, and others, at Holyroodhouse. The plaintive drone of a weeping woman, cruelly punctured and shattered corpses, a pool of blood "that never dries", and a disembodied Italian voice with unexpected musical tastes all imply the wrath of wraiths behind recent atrocities. But Holmes and Watson deduce that greed, rather than ghosts, may be to blame. |
The Unseen Queen | Troy Denning | null | A year after the events of the previous novel, Luke Skywalker, his wife Mara, Han and Leia Organa Solo, Saba Sebatyne, and their charges arrive in the Killiks' inhabited sector of space, the Utegetu Nebula, and land on the world of Woteba to meet up with UnuThul. As they pass through the village to meet the Colony's leader, they notice that the Killiks are suffering some kind of affliction. When they all meet UnuThul, he explains that the affliction that they are suffering has been dubbed the "Fizz," and the cause of it is unknown. Han and Leia question UnuThul about the suspicions that the Galactic Alliance has of the Killiks hiding pirates and smugglers in the Utegetu Nebula. In response, the Colony's leader suggests the accusation that this could be in addition to the Galactic Alliance having deliberately selected the worlds of the nebula because they were meant to kill the Killiks with the Fizz for the trouble they caused at Qoribu. UnuThul then moves on to other business by informing everyone with him that the Gorog are back. Luke agrees to take Han, C-3PO, and R2-D2, to explore Woteba in order to find and clear out the lingering Dark Nest threat, as well as to confirm or deny the Galactic Alliance's accusations of the Killiks hiding pirates and smugglers. Leia and Saba, with a sample of the Fizz, take the Millennium Falcon back to Ossus in order to find out what the Fizz is. Mara goes with the Jedi women back to Ossus, and after this, Luke, Han, and the others come into contact with Alema Rar. Alema tells Luke to leave the Dark Nest alone, and in return, they will release new footage of Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala from R2-D2's memory files every week. In fact, Alema and her Gorog comrades do this, and Luke feigns acceptance. However, as soon as she and her fellow Gorog leave, he tells Han that he doesn't intend to honor that promise. Meanwhile, Jacen Solo takes his cousin, Ben Skywalker, from a camping trip on the Sanctuary Moon of Endor to Hapes in response to Tenel Ka Djo's call. When they secretly arrive in Tenel Ka's room, they discover that she has a baby daughter, and it is shared with Jacen. As it turns out, Tenel Ka slowed the child's growth in her womb in order to avoid suspicion as to the baby's paternity. The four of them are then attacked by Gorog, but with the help of Ben's nanny battle droid, they kill the assassins, and then Jacen and Tenel Ka hypothesize why the Gorog would be interested in attacking them. They come to the conclusion that it was thanks to Tenel Ka's grandmother, Ta'a Chume. Later, Jacen interrogates Ta'a Chume and finds out that she indeed sent those Gorog to kill Tenel Ka's daughter. The reason for this is because the Gorog came to Ta'a Chume for navigation technology, and in return, Chume sent them to kill Tenel Ka's baby; this way, Ta'a Chume could find a way to reclaim power as Queen Mother again so a Jedi won't rule the Hapes Consortium ever again. In response, Jacen tortures Ta'a Chume into a permanent coma from which she'll never recover. After this, he has an apocalyptic vision of an eternal war between man, Chiss, and Killik that will ultimately consume the galaxy. Back on Woteba, Luke, Han, and the others come across a gang trading credits for spice from the Gorog. A battle brakes out between the smugglers and Gorog against Luke and Han. The former group is killed in the confrontation, and Luke and Han find that the Fizz consumes the corpses of their enemies. They return to UnuThul, where Luke explains that the Fizz is most likely a biological agent that protects the environment of Woteba from harm via dangerous enemies. UnuThul thanks Luke and Han for this and gives them Killik-made replicas of the X-wing Luke flew at the Battle of Yavin 36 years earlier and of the Millennium Falcon. Then Alema appears and takes UnuThul and his following Killiks under complete control of the Dark Nest. The Killiks then place Luke, Han, and the others in a prison so that they will spend enough time to become part of the Colony's hive mind. Han comes up with a plan after he figures out that the Killiks are shipping their replicas throughout the galaxy, and correctly hypothesizes that Jae Juun and Tarfang are working for them in this manner. He calls for them to come over, and to pass the time, Luke plays a holorecording that R2-D2 took when Anakin Skywalker, now Darth Vader, had carried out Order 66 in the Jedi Temple. Juun and Tarfang come over, and Han shatters his replica of the Millennium Falcon, which turns out to be Gorog assassins in disguise. They kill the assassins, and come to the horrifying conclusion that with the false replicas transported even to the Galactic Alliance military, the galaxy is in serious trouble. In the Galactic Alliance, Chief of State Cal Omas becomes impatient with the New Jedi Order's progress in dealing with the Killik problem, so he takes advantage of Luke's absence from the Order and appoints Corran Horn as its temporary leader. Omas tells Corran to hold the Jedi off as he sends an Alliance fleet to form a blockade around the Utegetu Nebula. Meanwhile, Cilghal tells Leia and Saba that the Fizz was part of the explosion that created the nebula, and it infected every one of the nebula's worlds so that while the plant life could flourish, no other kind of life could live there for long. Leia and Saba then go back to the nebula to tell the Killiks that they can't inhabit any of the nebula's worlds, but they run straight into the Alliance blockade. While Leia and Saba are captured, Mara remains on the loose. In response, half the Jedi turn to Kyp Durron in an effort to save Luke and the others. Jacen takes advantage of the schism to collect his Jedi colleagues from the Mission to Myrkr and the Battles of Qoribu and attack the Chiss space station of Thrago Depot. Jacen tells his friends that the Chiss are planning a preemptive attack on the Killiks, and that raiding Thrago Depot will delay their invasion of the Colony. In reality, however, the Chiss have no intention of restarting their conflict with the Killiks, and Jacen intends to persuade the Ascendancy through this Jedi attack to start a war that will most likely exterminate the Colony. The Jedi Knights' attack on Thrago Depot ensues successfully without casualties from either side as Kyp Durron and his Jedi supporters go to the Alliance blockade around the Utegetu Nebula. On Woteba, Luke, Han, and the others, with the help of Jae Juun and Tarfang, manage to escape their prison, and they make it off of Woteba. They later get into a brief battle against smugglers, and then sneak aboard a Gorog nest ship just before it goes into hyperspace. When it comes out, it rendezvous with other Killik nest ships right at the Galactic Alliance blockade. When this happens, just after Leia and Saba escape from their prison cells, the replicas that the Killiks gave the Alliance military pop open with Gorog assassins, and begin taking over the ships they're on. Leia, aboard the ship Admiral Ackbar, convinces Admiral Nek Bwua'tu to abandon ship as the Killiks spark the battle of the Murgo Choke (the Murgo Choke is where the bulk of the blockade is). But before Leia evacuates, she gets into a second lightsaber duel with Alema Rar, further wounds the Dark Jedi, and emerges victorious, although Alema escapes death once again. As the Battle of the Murgo Choke rages, Luke, Han, and the others actually enter the Gorog nest ship to at least disable it, if not altogether destroy it. There, they confront Lomi Plo, who uses her powers to manipulate the doubts of others so that they can't see her; hence, she is the titular unseen queen of the novel. Despite her invisibility, Luke is able to combat Plo while Mara, in her StealthX, manages to destroy the Gorog nest ship's hyperdrive core. Plo escapes while the heroes regroup with Admiral Bwua'tu aboard the Mon Mothma as the Battle of the Murgo Choke draws to a close. But with all of the events that have occurred, war is certain. The Swarm War has begun. |
The Swarm War | Troy Denning | null | The story begins with the Jedi group of Jaina and Jacen Solo, Lowbacca, Zekk, Tahiri Veila, and Tesar Sebatyne on the Killik world of Snevu, watching as the Chiss try and destroy the planet. While there, they discover a bomb that was made by the Chiss, which was meant to exterminate the Killik life on the planet, but the bomb failed to detonate. The Chiss send in infantry to try and vaporize the bomb, in which they succeed. Back on the planet Ossus, Luke Skywalker has called back all the Jedi (except Jaina and Zekk) and delivers an ultimatum. He wants anyone who cannot make being a Jedi their top priority to quit while he becomes Grand Master of the New Jedi Order, dictating that the Jedi will be servants of the Galactic Alliance for now on. The likes of Danni Quee and Tenel Ka Djo agree to this; Danni never considered herself a Jedi, and more of a scientist intrigued to explore the further mysteries of the living world of Zonama Sekot. Tenel Ka, on her part, has too much responsibility as Hapan Queen Mother and as a mother to her own daughter, Allana. Aside from Jacen and Tenel Ka, no one else knows who Allana's father is. Following Luke's conclave on Ossus, he and his family watch another holovid from R2-D2's memory banks where Anakin Skywalker, now Darth Vader, speaks to his wife, Padme Amidala, after carrying out Order 66 in the Old Jedi Temple. Luke and the rest of the Jedi consider how to end the Dark Nest Crisis and the Swarm War. Killing Lomi Plo won't be enough, Cilghal explains, because a new Gorog would emerge to manipulate the Killiks from behind the scenes; so neutralizing UnuThul as leader of the Killiks, thus dissembling the entire Colony hive mind overall, is the only way to end this conflict. But in order to defeat Lomi Plo, Luke must purge all doubt from his heart and mind so that he can fight and kill Plo to the best of his abilities. Jacen helps him along with that. Han, Leia, C-3PO, Saba Sebatyne, Cakhmaim, and Meewalh all go traveling throughout the major sectors of the galaxy now involved in the Swarm War. Their mission is to find Jaina and Zekk and bring them back within the Jedi Order's fold. They once again come into contact with Jae Juun and Tarfang, who tell them that Jaina and Zekk are fighting with the Killiks against the Chiss on Tenupe. After Luke purges all doubt from his mind by watching the last of R2-D2's family recordings that depicted scenes from Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the Grand Master of the Jedi Order travels to Tenupe, where Lomi Plo and UnuThul are. Han and Leia foil the Chiss's attempt to eradicate the Killiks on Tenupe with a biological bomb, similar to the one deployed on Snevu, just as Leia engages Alema Rar in their final lightsaber duel of the trilogy. Leia once again emerges victorious as Alema is caught in the jaws of one of Tenupe's beasts and disappears into the planet's jungle. As this happens, Luke confronts UnuThul and Lomi Plo aboard the captured Admiral Ackbar. There, he briefly fights UnuThul before convincing him to renounce his leadership of the Killiks. He does so and becomes Raynar Thul again, while Luke manages to kill Lomi Plo in their final duel. With that, the Killik hive mind, including that of the Gorog, dissipates into nothingness. The Dark Nest Crisis and the Swarm War conclude, with the Killiks now a harmless race; the Chiss go back to their own business in the Unknown Regions, and the Galactic Alliance returns to its normal duties in peacetime. For all she did as a Jedi apprentice under Master Saba Sebatyne, Leia is promoted from apprentice to Jedi Knight. Then, when asked about what will happen to the Jedi Order should he ever be absent again, Luke replies, "I don't know. I wish I had the answers." |
Gerald's Party | Robert Coover | null | As Gerald tries to describe the things around him in painstaking detail, he recounts simultaneous conversations and events as they happen by using a format similar to data packet handling. After describing a small part of a situation or a conversation, he moves on to a small part of a different conversation, then returns to the first conversation, or maybe moves on to a third or a fourth, returning each time to try to be as accurate as possible while recording the events.so |
A Million Little Pieces | James Frey | 2,003 | The badly tattered James awakens on an airplane to Chicago, with no recollection of his injuries or of how he ended up on the plane. He is met by his parents at the airport, who take him to a rehabilitation clinic. We find out that James is 23 years old, and has been an alcoholic for ten years, and a crack addict for three. He is also wanted by the police in three different states on several charges. As he checks into the rehab clinic, he is forced to quit his substance abuse, a transition that we find out later probably saves his life, but is also an incredibly agonizing event. As part of this, he is forced to undergo a series of painful root canals, without any anesthesia because of possible negative reactions to the drugs. He copes with the pain by squeezing tennis balls until his nails crack (when challenged on this incident, specifically, during his second Oprah appearance, Frey said that it may have been "more than one" root canal procedure and may or may not have included Novocaine, as he remembers it). The book follows Frey through the painful experiences that lead up to his eventual release from the center, including his participation in the clinic's family program with his parents, despite his strong desire not to. Throughout the novel, Frey speaks of the "Fury" he is fighting, which he sees as the cause of his desire to drink alcohol and use drugs. The "Fury" could be seen as the antagonist of the novel, because he believes that he will not be able to recover until he learns to ignore it or "kill it." Frey meets many interesting people in the clinic, with whom he forms relationships and who play an important role in his life both during and after his time in the clinic. These people include a mafia boss who plays a vital role in his recovery (subject of Frey's subsequent book My Friend Leonard), and a woman drug addict with whom he falls in love, despite strict rules forbidding contact between men and women at the clinic. James finally recovers and never relapses. A notable feature of Pieces is its lack of quotation marks to indicate direct discourse. Instead, a new line is started each time. The fact that the author uses this same style to indicate his internal thoughts, often interspersed between direct discourse from himself and others, gives the book a unique and sometimes confusing writing style, purportedly reflecting the nature of his experience in the treatment center. Frey makes frequent use of this stream of consciousness writing technique, which allows the reader to better understand his version of the events. Frey's unique writing style also involves his capitalizing nouns throughout the book for unclear reasons. Frey also uses heavy repetition of words throughout the text. |
Betrayal | Aaron Allston | 2,006 | Thirty-six years after the fall of the Galactic Empire, the novel begins with Luke Skywalker sensing the dark presence of a mysterious enemy. Jacen Solo and Ben Skywalker are sent on a mission to disable the planet of Corellia's new independent weapons on Adumar. After they are discovered, they fight their way out of the facility and report to the Galactic Alliance of their discoveries. Han and Leia Solo host a dinner with the Skywalkers as guests at LukStation, where the failed peace meeting between the GA and Corellia took place. As this happens, a mysterious tassel is discovered, which Jacen looks to investigate with Ben on the information planet of Lorrd. Jacen and Ben meet up with Jedi Knight Nelani Dinn and they seek to find the meaning imbedded in the tassel. As they do this, they encounter crimes where mentally unstable individuals are motivated by their obsession with Jedi. The crimes all trace back to a woman named Brisha Syo. When arrested and questioned, Brisha demands to speak with the Jedi, to which they quickly acquiesce. Jacen asks what she knows about the crimes on Lorrd, and realizes that she's Force-sensitive. Brisha invites Jacen, Ben, and Nelani to her home on an asteroid near Bimmiel. They agree, so they set course for this asteroid. When they arrive, Brisha informs them that she suspects that there is a Sith Lord in the caves beneath the asteroid, and that she needs the Jedi to get rid of him. They agree, and they follow Brisha down into the bowels of the asteroid. While they're in the cart that's taking them down into the caverns, Ben and Nelani are both yanked out of the travel cart by Brisha through the Force. When Jacen demands why she did it, she informs him that they would have died fighting the Sith Lord. While Jacen's still suspicious of her motives, he goes along with her down to the caves. When Jacen and Brisha are separated, he comes face to face with a dark side version of his uncle Luke Skywalker, and Ben fights a dark side version of his mother, Mara Jade Skywalker; on Coruscant, Luke and Mara are likewise fighting dark side versions of their nephew and son, respectively. At the end of each fight, they each feel uneasy of their battles, except Ben, who is knocked unconscious. Jacen and Brisha reunite, with Brisha saying that she was the one who conjured the dark versions of each of them, as a test for Jacen. Brisha then leads Jacen to a very colorful house in a large cave, and tells Jacen that it was the home of the Sith Lord Darth Vectivus. Brisha also reveals that her true name is Shira Brie, a.k.a. Lumiya, an enemy of Luke Skywalker. She then goes on to explain that Jacen has never heard of Vectivus because he never tried to conquer the galaxy, or tried to eradicate the Jedi Order. She tells him that Vectivus believed in peace and learning, and that Jacen's perception of the Sith has been clouded by the Empire's reign of terror and the Jedi's philosophical and subjective stance against them. By then, Nelani has also arrived at Vectivus' mansion, and tries to arrest Lumiya. She refuses, and she and Nelani do battle, Nelani with her lightsaber, and Lumiya with her lightwhip. All the while, Lumiya tries to convince Jacen that the true Sith way is one of peace and understanding, and that he is destined to become the next Sith Lord, just as Vergere taught him. Lumiya and Nelani's battle ends, and Jacen, stunned by this revelation, peers into the future, and realizes that if he doesn't kill Nelani, each future ends with Luke dying by Jacen's hand. Devastated, Jacen takes off after Nelani when she realizes his intent, and stabs her through the chest with his lightsaber in the midst of combat. When he returns to Lumiya, Jacen wipes Ben's solid memories of his experiences in the Home. And then tells her that he will accept her Sith teachings in order to save the galaxy from spiraling out of control from the upcoming war between the Galactic Alliance and Corellia. The novel ends on Coruscant, where, as Luke senses that the presence of the dark man he sensed at the beginning of the novel is real now, Mara informs Luke that Jacen and Ben are returning home. |
Bloodlines | Karen Traviss | 2,006 | "But the bitterest enemy can be your own flesh and blood - and your foe can turn out to be your only ally." In Bloodlines, a civil war continues to break out in the Galactic Alliance, as acts of terrorism on the part of Coruscant's local Corellians force the Alliance to create even more repressive laws. Many families find themselves divided, including the Solo/Skywalker families as Han Solo's Corellian roots and Luke Skywalker's dedication to the Jedi are creating conflict. Meanwhile, Luke and Mara Skywalker fear for their son, Ben, when his cousin and Jedi Knight, Jacen Solo, makes a dangerous choice. This choice shocks both families. After going on numerous raids with Jacen, Ben gets the chance to make a decision about a raid in which he kills two people. This experience shakes him to the core, and he begins to distrust Jacen's teachings. In this novel, the conflict's main author (and Han's cousin), Thrackan Sal-Solo, finally meets his end when Mirta Gev, Boba Fett's granddaughter, shoots him in the head. Meanwhile, Jacen continues on the path to becoming a Sith, deciding that the only thing left for him to do is to "immortalize his love," according to the Sith tassels. Jacen loves Tenel Ka and their daughter Allana very much, but if he is to achieve his full Sith ranking, it appears that he must kill them. While wracked with doubt and sorrow, Jacen decides that the sacrifice is worthwhile if it means he can save the galaxy. With that goal in mind, he believes that he must follow the path of his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, in order to achieve it. He even "flow walks" through time with the Force in order to witness his grandfather's fall from grace (as portrayed in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) and decides that his journey is meant to be different. Jacen may yet acquire full Sith knowledge and acknowledgement and avoid becoming another Darth Vader. The choice that Jacen chooses is when he kills Boba Fett's daughter, Ailyn Vel, during an interrogation; Ailyn had been smuggling military-grade weapons on Coruscant, and Jacen was trying to figure out who would be her target. Although he doesn't get an answer from her, her targets were supposed to be Han and Leia Organa Solo. After he learns of this, Fett decides not to kill Jacen in vengeance, but rather, as he sees Jacen falling to the dark side with his actions against Coruscant's Corellians, the galaxy's greatest bounty hunter figures that it would hurt Jacen more to let him live; by falling to the dark side as he is, and just like his late grandfather Darth Vader had, letting him live long enough to fall to the dark side will have Jacen see his friends and family turn on him in the future. A subplot to Fett's arc is that he has an illness that is degenerating his cells. |
Ashenden: Or the British Agent | W. Somerset Maugham | 1,928 | A playwright called Ashenden is recruited by Colonel R., a British Intelligence officer. He is sent to Switzerland where he becomes involved in a series of adventures. In one he accompanies a man called the Hairless Mexican to Italy, where a Greek agent of the Germans is to be assassinated. In another he must get an Italian dancer to induce her Indian lover, a German agent, to cross the border into Switzerland to see her, so that Ashenden can arrest him. # R. # A Domiciliary Visit # Miss King # The Hairless Mexican # The Dark Woman # The Greek # A Trip to Paris # Giulia Lazzari # Gustav # The Traitor # Behind the Scenes # His Excellency # The Flip of a Coin # A Chance Acquaintance # Love and Russian Literature # Mr. Harrington's Washing The chapters are collected in later collections under different titles, as below. It is unknown whether they were rewritten slightly from original publication. * "A Domiciliary Visit" & "Miss King" as Miss King * "The Hairless Mexican", "The Dark Woman", "The Greek" as The Hairless Mexican * "A Trip to Paris, "Giulia Lazzari" as Giulia Lazzari * "Gustav", "The Traitor" as The Traitor * "Behind the Scenes", "His Excellency", as His Excellency * "A Chance Acquaintance", "Love and Russian Literature", "Mr. Harrington's Washing" as Mr. Harrington's Washing |
Tutankhamun and the Daughter of Ra | Moyra Caldecott | 1,990 | Ankhesenamun has never been safe in all her short life – not even with her beloved husband and half brother Tutankhamun. Daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten and the fabled Nefertiti, and married at one time to her father, she is forced to marry Tutankhamun by the powerful General Horemheb at a time of bitter political and religious division. Ankhesenamun is the delicate link between scheming factions. Left vulnerable by the failure of her plans for the sacred egg of Ra and the death of her young husband, Ankhesenamun is forced into making one last extraordinary and desperate bid for life and happiness... |
Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | 2,004 | The book is an account of the memories and legacy of John Ames as he remembers his experiences of his father and grandfather to share with his son. All three men share a vocational lifestyle and profession as Congregationalist ministers in Gilead, Iowa. John Ames describes his vocation as "giving you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore", explaining that your vocation is something both hard to fulfill and hard to obtain. He writes that this is one of the most important pieces of wisdom he can bestow to his son. Ames' father was a Christian pacifist, but his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who carried out guerrilla actions with John Brown before the American Civil War, served as a chaplain with the Union forces in that war, and incited his congregation to join up and serve in it; as Ames remarks, "He preached this town into the war." The grandfather returned from the war maimed with the loss of his right eye. Thereafter he was given the distinction that his right side was holy or sacred in some way, that it was his link to commune with God, and he was notorious for a piercing stare with the one eye he had left. The grandfather's other eccentricities are recalled in his youth: the practice of giving all and any of the family's possessions to others and preaching with a gun in a bloodied shirt. The true character and intimate details of the father are revealed in context with anecdotes regarding the grandfather, and mainly in the search for the grave of the grandfather. One event that is prevalent in the narrator's orations is the memory of receiving 'communion' from his father at the remains of a Baptist church, burned by lightning (Ames recalls this as an invented memory adapted from his father breaking and sharing an ashy biscuit for lunch). In the course of the novel, it quickly emerges that Ames's first wife, Louisa, died while giving birth to their daughter, Rebecca (a.k.a. Angeline) who also died soon after. Ames reflects on the death of his family as the source of great sorrow for many years, in contrast and with special reference to the growing family of the Rev. Boughton, local Presbyterian minister and Ames' dear and lifelong friend. Many years later Ames meets his second wife, Lila, a less-educated woman who appears in church one Pentecost Sunday. Eventually Ames baptizes Lila and their relationship develops, culminating in her proposal to him. As Ames writes his memoirs, Boughton's son, John Ames Boughton (Jack), reappears in the town after leaving it in disgrace twenty years earlier, following his seduction and abandonment of a girl from a poverty-stricken family near his university. The daughter of this relationship died poor and uncared-for at the age of three, despite the Boughton family's well-intended but unwelcome efforts to look after the child. Young Boughton, the apple of his parents' eye but deeply disliked by Ames, seeks Ames out; much of the tension in the novel results from Ames's mistrust of Jack Boughton and particularly of his relationship with Lila and their son. In the dénouement, however, it turns out that Jack Boughton is himself suffering from his forced separation from his own common-law wife, an African American from Tennessee, and their son; the family are not allowed to live together because of segregationist laws, and her family utterly rejects Jack Boughton. It is implied that Jack's understanding with Lila lies in their common sense of tragedy as she prepares for the death of Ames, who has given her a security and stability she has never known before. Although there is action in the story, its mainspring lies in Ames' theological struggles on a whole series of fronts: with his grandfather's engagement in the Civil War, with his own loneliness through much of his life, with his brother's clear and his father's apparent loss of belief, with his father's desertion of the town, with the hardships of people's lives, and above all with his feelings of hostility and jealousy towards young Boughton, whom he knows at some level he has to forgive. Ames' struggles are illustrated by numerous quotations from the Bible, from theologians (especially Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion) and from philosophers, especially the atheist Feuerbach, whom Ames greatly respects. It is unusual that a book with so much openly religious and theological content should be so widely recognized as a successful novel and should achieve such acclaim from a secular audience. However the abstract and theological content is made meaningful because it is seen through the eyes of Ames, who is presented in a deeply sympathetic manner and who writes his memoir from a position of serenity, despite his suffering and a knowledge of his own limitations and failings. Throughout the novel, Ames details a reverential awe for the transcendental pathos in the small personal moments of happiness and peace with his wife and son and the town of Gilead, despite the loneliness and sorrow he feels for leaving the world with things undone and unsolved. In the closing pages of the book, Ames learns of Jack Boughton's true situation and is able to offer him the genuine affection and forgiveness he has never before been able to feel for him. |
A Wild Sheep Chase | Haruki Murakami | 1,982 | This mock-detective tale follows an unnamed Japanese man through Tokyo and Hokkaidō in 1978. The passive, chain-smoking main character gets swept away on an adventure that leads him on a hunt for a sheep that hasn’t been seen for years. The apathetic protagonist meets a woman with magically seductive ears and a strange man who dresses as a sheep and talks in slurs; in this way there are elements of Japanese animism or Shinto. The manipulation of the narrator into the hunt and repeated references to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes raise connections to "The Red-Headed League." |
The Ringworld Engineers | Larry Niven | 1,980 | The plot of the novel centers on the instability of the Ringworld. The recently-deposed Hindmost, leader of the Puppeteers, abducts the human Louis Wu (who has become a wirehead) and kzinti Chmeee (previously known as "Speaker-to-Animals"). Both were part of the Ringworld exploration in the first novel. The Hindmost hopes to acquire Ringworld technology that he hopes will help him reacquire his position as leader. In the course of the novel, Louis and Chmeee set forth on an exploration of the Ringworld in order to learn where the creators of the Ringworld may have built a control or repair system. In their travels they meet a number of the hominid species that have evolved on the Ringworld. They also learn more about the "maps" of various known space worlds that are located in one of the Ringworld's great oceans. These full-size maps include, among others, Kzin, Earth, and Mars. It is on the Map of Mars that the party finds the Ringworld control room, located in a vast maze of rooms contained in the hollow space under the map. In order to create the rarefied atmosphere on Mars, the Map of Mars was built to an altitude above the main Ringworld surface creating a cavity. The Control Room contains living space for thousands of Pak Protectors, as well as space to grow the "Tree-of-Life" plants to support this many Protectors. Other rooms in the cavity support such features as the "Meteor Defense System", which uses the superconductor grid embedded in the scrith foundation material to manipulate the magnetic field of the Ringworld's sun to create a solar flare; it uses this to generate a powerful gas laser, which is capable of destroying everything in its path. In the course of finding the control room and saving the Ringworld, the party learns what became of Teela Brown, who had been left behind after the exploration twenty years earlier led by the Puppeteer, Nessus. |
The Ringworld Throne | Larry Niven | 1,996 | This book consists of two main plot threads, which only come together towards the end of the book. The majority of the first half of the story is devoted to a plot where a variety of hominid species from the ring join together to kill a large nest of vampires (the shadow nest) which has been feeding on all of them. Some of the characters are also found in The Ringworld Engineers, as early on in this book Niven tells us that relatively few of the hominids died when Louis Wu and the Hindmost restabilised the ring at the end of the previous book. The second part of the book details the continuing adventures of Louis Wu, who is now aging and ill. Eventually he returns to the Hindmost and is healed, only for the pair of them—and also a Kzin called Acolyte, who is Chmee's son—to be enslaved by a vampire protector. What follows is a power struggle between Protectors on the rim wall and the vampire protectors who have control of the ringworld's defences. In many of the situations in this section of the book Louis, the Hindmost and Acolyte are present only as observers, as it is the Protectors who are the main protagonists of the story. |
Strawberry Girl | Lois Lenski | 1,945 | Set in the Florida in the early 20th century, the story deals with two families, the Boyers and the Slaters. The Boyers move to Florida to raise strawberries. They come into conflict with their new neighbors, the Slaters, who raise cattle and let their animals roam loose. The two main characters are Birdie Boyer, the "Strawberry Girl" of the book's title, and Shoestring Slater, whose pony ruins the Boyers' strawberries. The feud between the two families heightens through the book, but they reconcile by the end of the novel. |
Baalyakaalasakhi | Vaikom Muhammad Basheer | null | The childhood romance between neighbours blossoms into passionate love during adolescence. Majeed's father was rich once, so could send him to a school in the distant town, although he was not very good at studies. Suhra's father on the other hand had trouble making both ends meet. Even then he wanted to send his daughter, who was good at studies to the school. But after her father's death, all her hopes of further studies was ruined. Majeed begs his father to sponsor Suhra's education, but he refuses. Majeed leaves home after a skirmish with his father, and wanders over distant lands for a long time before returning home. On his return, he finds that his family's former affluence is all gone, and that his beloved Suhra has married someone else. He is grief struck at the loss of love, and this is when Suhra turns up at his home. She is a shadow of her former self. The beautiful, sunshiny, vibrant Suhra of old is now a woman worn out by life, battered hard by a loveless marriage to an abusive husband. Majeed commands her, "Suhra, don't go back!" and she stays. Majeed leaves home once again, but this time with plans on his mind. He needs to find a job, to ward off poverty, and thus he reaches a North Indian city. He finds work as a salesman but one day he meets with a bicycle accident in which he loses a leg. The day after he is discharged from hospital, he is informed that he's fired from his job. He again sets off on a job quest knocking at every door, wearing off his soles. He finds work as a dish-washer in a hotel. As he scrubs dirty dishes each day, he dreams of Suhra back home waiting for him to return. He must make enough money to return home and repay debts, before he can finally get married to the woman of his life. His mother writes him that Suhra is sick and subsequently of Suhara's death. |
The Kingdom of the Wicked | Anthony Burgess | 1,985 | The story of the birth of Christianity and its interaction with the Roman Empire is told largely chronologically by a narrator slowly succumbing to disease during the reign of Domitian. The story starts where Man of Nazareth ended, immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus, and covers the work of the apostles, in particular Paul (who himself was not one of the original twelve apostles), the development of Christianity as an Abrahamic religion separate from Judaism, the Great Fire of Rome, the persecution of Christians, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the destruction of Pompeii. |
The Lost City of Faar | D.J. MacHale | 2,003 | Loor flumes to her home in Zadaa while Press and Bobby flume to Cloral. Most of the book takes place on the territory known as Cloral, a planet that is entirely covered by water. The inhabitants of Cloral live on giant floating barges, called habitats. The main habitat in the book is called Grallion. Grallion is responsible for growing food for Cloral. A territory called Zadaa is also visited. Pendragon goes searching for a mythical city called Faar. |
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