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Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord | Louis de Bernières | 1,991 | When the philosophy lecturer Dionisio Vivo confronts drug lords and the government through letters and a series of newspaper articles in La Prensa, he becomes the enemy of the ruthless coca lord El Jerarca, the character of which is probably based on the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. His implausible escapes from the assassins sent by El Jerarca compel the people of the country to regard him as a magical 'brujo' and the saviour to their conflict and poverty. Indeed, hundreds of women follow him in a pilgrimage across the country, each carrying the hope of bearing his child. His excellency President Veracruz attempts to put an end to the country's soaring inflation through a series of foolishly unrealistic measures, and searches for spiritual enlightenment with his ex-prostitute wife through magical potions and alchemy. An array of prostitutes, guerrillas and townspeople from the first book re-appear throughout. |
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman | Louis de Bernières | 1,992 | Cardinal Guzman lives extravagantly in the capital, and immorally, due to the discoveries of his having had a young son and his loathing of the poor shanty-dwellers who live below his palace. Despite the downfall of El Jerarca in Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, the drug trade continues and the economy of the country spirals ever downward. Cardinal Guzman's clergy and the corrupt military of the country set out to destroy the heresy of the countryside, and, more specifically, Cochadebajo de los Gatos, home of Dionisio and many of the other characters. In so doing the hypocrisy of the Cardinal's faith with his own promiscuity is revealed. |
The Glory | Herman Wouk | 1,994 | Interweaving the lives and fates of fictional characters and real-life notables, the sequel to The Hope continues the story of Israeli history to the climactic events of the Yom Kippur War and the promise of peace. Historical events in the book include: * The sinking of the Israeli ship Eilat by Soviet rockets fired by the Egyptian Navy. * The War of Attrition. * The Yom Kippur War. * Operation Entebbe. * The visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel. Families whose history is chronicled in The Glory: * Barak-Berkowe-Berkowitz * Nitzan-Bloom-Blumenthal * Luria * Pasternak Real historical personages in the novel include Yonatan Netanyahu, Golda Meir, Ariel Sharon, Anwar Sadat, Moshe Dayan, and David Elazar. |
Chance and Necessity | Jacques Monod | null | Preface *1. Of strange objects *2. Vitalisms and animisms The scientific condemnation of the predeterminism *1. The demon of Maxwell *2. Microscopic cybernetics *3. Molecular ontogeny *4. Invariance and pertubation *5. Evolution *6. The boundary *7. The Kingdom and darkness Appendix Monod starts the preface of the book by saying that biology is both marginal and central. He goes on to explain that it is marginal because the living world is only a fraction of the universe. Monod believes the ultimate aim of science is to "clarify man's relationship to the universe"(Monod, xi) and from that reasoning he accords biology a central role. He goes on to state that he does not intend to make a thorough survey of modern biology but rather to "bring out the form of its key concepts and to point out their logical relationships with other areas of thought…it is an avowed attempt to extract the quintessence of the molecular theory of the code" (Monod, xiii). Monod stresses the importance of the molecular theory of the genetic code as a physical theory of heredity and brands it as the "secret of life". He continues to explain how this important discovery has made it the duty of scientists to share with and enhance other disciplines of thought such as philosophy. Toward the end of the preface Monod offers apology for any overly tedious or technical sections. He also warns that some ethical and political ideas he presents may seem naïve or ambitious but then states "Modesty benefits the scientist, but not the ideas that inhabit him and which he is under the obligation of upholding"(Monod, xiv). In the last paragraph of the preface Monod explains that his essay developed from the Robins Lectures that he gave in 1969 at Pomona College. Monod starts off chapter I entitled "Of Strange Objects" with a consideration of the difference between natural and artificial objects and states that "the basic premise of the scientific method... [is] that nature is objective and not projective"(Monod, 3). Through a series of thought experiments and rhetorical questions he leads the reader on a difficult path to three characteristics of living beings. One is teleonomy which Monod defines as the characteristic of being "endowed with a purpose or project"(Monod, 9). Another is autonomous morphogenesis which points out that a living being’s structure results from interactions within the being as opposed to the external forces that shape artificial artifacts. Monod offers a single exception to this last criterium in the form of a crystal and at this point he states that the internal forces that determine structure within living beings are "of the same nature as the microscopic interactions responsible for crystalline morphologies"(Monod, 11), a theme that he promises to develop in later chapters. The last general property Monod offers up as distinguishing living organisms is reproductive invariance which is the ability of a living being to reproduce and transmit the information corresponding to their own highly ordered structure. The author defines the primary telonomic project "as consisting in the transmission from generation to generation of the invariance content characteristic of the species"(Monod, 14) (the preservation and multiplication of the species). Monod later retracts autonomous morphogenesis (spontaneous structuration) as a property of living beings and says instead that it should be thought of as "mechanism" leaving two essential properties of living beings: reproductive invariance and structural teleonomy. He then brings up and defends against a possible thermodynamic objection to reproductive invariance and points out the extreme efficiency of the teleonomic apparatus in accomplishing the preservation and reproduction of the structure. Here the author restates that nature is objective and does not pursue an end or have a purpose and he points out an apparent "epistemological [the study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge] contradiction" between the teleonomic character of living organisms and the principle of objectivity. With that cliffhanger of internal intellectual struggle Monod ends chapter one. In chapter two "Vitalisms and Animisms" Monod states that invariance must have preceded teleonomy, a conclusion reached by the Darwinian idea that teleonomic structures are due to variations in structures that already had the property of invariance and could therefore preserve the effects of chance mutations. He offers the selective theory as being consistent with the postulate of objectivity and allowing for epistemological coherence. The author then says that in the rest of the chapter he will address religious ideologies and philosophical systems that assume the reverse hypothesis: that invariance developed out of an initial teleonomic principle (this defies the principle of objectivity). He divides these theories into vitalist, in which the teleonomic principle operates only in living matter (there is a purpose/direction in which living things alone develop), and animist, in which there is a universal teleonomic principle (that is expressed more intensely in the biosphere and therefore living beings are seen as products of universally oriented evolution which has culminated in mankind). Monod admits he is more interested in animism and will therefore devote more analysis to it. He briefly discuses the murky metaphysical vitalism of Henri Bergson and then discusses the scientific vitalism of Elsasser and Polanyi which contend that physical forces and chemical interactions that have been studied in non-living matter do not fully account for invariance and teleonomy and therefore other "biotonic laws" are at work in living matter. The author points out that the scientific vitalist argument lack support and that it draws its justification not from knowledge or observations but from our present day lack of knowledge. He goes on to point out that today the mechanism of invariance is sufficiently understood to the point that no non-physical principle ("biotonic law") is needed for its interpretation. Monod next points out that our ancestors had a history of animating objects by giving spirits to them so as to bridge the apparent gap between the living and non-living. To them a being made sense and was understandable only through the purpose animating the being and so if mysterious objects, such as rocks, rivers, rain, and stars, exist it must also be for a purpose (essentially there are no inanimate objects to them). The author says that this animist belief is due to a projection of man's awareness of his own teleonomic functioning onto inanimate nature. Nature is explained with the same conscious and purposive manner as human activity. Monod points out that this animist line of thought is still present in philosophy that makes no essential distinction between matter and life and frames biological evolution as a component of cosmic evolution (evolutive force operating throughout the entire universe). He contends that these lines of thought abandon the postulate of objectivity and also contain the anthropocentric illusion. At the end of this chapter Monod states that the thesis he "shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events but constitutes a particular occurrence, compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore essentially unpredictable" (Monod, 43). In his view the biosphere is unpredictable for the same reason that the particular configuration of atoms in a pebble are unpredictable. By this Monod does not mean to imply that the biosphere is not explicable from initial conditions/first principles but that it is not deducible (at best predictions could be no more than statistical probabilities of existence). He then points out that society is willing to accept a universal theory that is compatible with but does not foresee the particular configuration of atoms in a pebble but it is a different story when it comes to humans; "We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency" (Monod, 44). It is this contingency of human existence that is the central message of Chance and Necessity; that life arose by chance and all beings of life, including humans, are the products of natural selection. The third chapter is named "Maxwell's Demons". It starts off by stating that proteins are the molecular agents of teleonomic performance in living beings. Monod continues by writing that living beings are chemical machines, every organism constitutes a coherent and functional unit, and that the organism is a self-constructing machine whose macroscopic structure is not determined by outside forces but by autonomous internal interactions. The author spends much of the chapter reviewing general facts of biochemistry. He explains that proteins are composed of 100-10,000 amino acids and he distinguishes between elongated fibrous proteins that play a mechanical role and the more numerous globular proteins that are folded upon themselves. He talks about the extraordinary specificity of action that enzymes display as exemplified by their ability to not only recognize a specific geometric isomer but an optical isomer as well. He points out that enzymes are optically active themselves, L isomers are the "natural" isomers, and that the specificity of action and the sterospecificity of the reaction conducted by an enzyme are the result of the positioning of the molecules with respect to each other. Monod writes that an enzymatic reaction can be seen in two steps: The formation of a sterospecific complex between protein and substrate and the catalytic activation of a reaction within the complex (he stresses again that the reaction is oriented and specified by the structure of the complex). He next considers the energetic differences between covalent and non-covalent bonds and how the speed of a reaction is affected by activation energy. Since the activation energy of a covalent bond is high the reaction will have a slower speed than that of a non-covalent bond (which occurs spontaneously and rapidly). The author points out that non-covalent interactions attain stability only through numerous interactions and when applied over short distances. To attain stable non-covalent interaction there is a need for complementary sites between two interacting molecules so as to permit several atoms of the one to enter into contact with several atoms of the other. In this complex the molecule of substrate is strictly positioned by the multiple non-covalent interactions with the enzyme. Enzymatic catalysis is believed to result from the inductive and polarizing action of certain chemical groupings of the specific receptor. By virtue of an enzymes capacity to form sterospecific and non-covalent complexes with specific substrate the substrate is correctly presented in the precise orientation that specifies the catalytic effect of the enzyme. Monod reminds us that this reaction comes at the expense of chemical potential energy. In chapter four ("Microscopic Cybernetics") the author starts out by repeating the characteristic of extreme specificity of enzymes and the extreme efficiency of the chemical machinery in living organisms. The large scale coordination among cells provided by the nervous and endocrine system is brought to the readers’ attention. The rest of the chapter is a discussion of the principles that cell metabolism works by. Monod first brings up allosteric enzymes that are capable of recognizing compounds other than a substrate whose association with the enzyme protein has a modifying effect of heightening or inhibiting the enzyme activity with respect to the substrate. Monod lists and defines four regulatory patterns. The first is feedback inhibition. Feedback activation is when the enzyme is activated by a product of degradation of the terminal metabolite. Parallel activation takes place when the first enzyme of a metabolic sequence is activated by a metabolite synthesized by an independent parallel sequence. Activation through a precursor is defined as when an enzyme is activated by a precursor of its substrate and a particularly frequent case of this is activation of the enzyme by the substrate itself. Allosteric enzymes are usually under the simultaneous control of several allosteric effectors. Next Monod makes reference to his own research and talks about the S shaped non-linear curve that is characteristic of allosteric enzymes when activity is plotted against concentration of an effector (including the substrate). Allosteric interactions are mediated by discrete shifts in the proteins structure and this allows certain proteins to assume different conformational states. Cooperative and antagonistic interactions of ligands are indirect: ligands interact with the protein not with other ligands. Allosteric proteins are oligomeric (made up of identical protomer subunits) and each protomer has a receptor for each of the ligands. As a consequence of protomer assembly each subunit is constrained by its neighbor. Upon dissociation each protomer can assume a relaxed state and this concerted response of each protomer accounts for the nonlinearity of enzyme activity: a ligand molecule that stabilizes the relaxed state of one of the monomers prevents the others from returning to the associated state. These simple molecular mechanisms account for the integrative properties of allosteric enzymes. Monod again references his own work as he talks about the lactose system (consisting of three proteins) in Escherica coli. He explains that galactoside permease (one of the proteins in the lactose system) enables the galactoside sugars to penetrate and accumulate within the cell. When Escherica coli are grown in a medium with no galactosides the three proteins are synthesized very slowly (about one molecule every five generations). About two minutes after adding a galactoside inducer the rate of synthesis of the three proteins increases a thousand fold. Monod explains that the rate of mRNA synthesis from the lactose operon determines the rate of the proteins synthesis. He lists the components of the regulatory system as i, the regulator gene that directs constant synthesis of the repressor protein (R), o, the operator segment of DNA that the repressor specifically recognizes and forms a stable complex with, and p, the DNA promoter where RNA polymerase binds. Synthesis of mRNA is blocked when the repressor is bound to the operator. When the repressor is in the free state it is able to recognize and bind beta galactosides thus dissociating the operator repressor complex and permitting synthesis of the mRNA and protein. Monod spends some time stressing that there need be no chemical relationship between a substrate and an allosteric ligand and it is this "gratuity" that has allowed molecular evolution to make a huge network of interconnections and make each organism an autonomous functional unit. In the last part of the chapter Monod criticizes "holists" who challenge the value to analytically complex systems such as living organisms and that complex systems cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. Monod first gives an example of dissecting a computer and then points out how teleonomic performances can be seen on a molecular level. He also states that the complexity of the cybernetic network in living beings is far too complex to study by the overall behavior of whole organisms. At the start of chapter five "Moleculat Ontogenesis" Monod states he will show that the process of spontaneous autonomous morphogenesis depends upon "the sterospecific recognition properties of proteins; that it is primarily a microscopic process before manifesting itself in macroscopic structures. Finally, it is the primary structure of proteins that we shall consult for the "secret" to those cognitive properties thanks to which, like Maxwell's demons, they animate and build living systems" (Monod 81). Monod mentions oligomeric globular proteins again and how they appear in aggregates containing geometrically equivalent protomer subunits associated into a non-covalent steric complex. With mild treatment protomers are separated and the oligomer protein loses function but if the initial "normal" conditions are restored the subunits will usually reassemble spontaneously. This spontaneity is due to the fact that the chemical potential needed to form the oligomer is present in the solution of monomers and because the bonds formed are non-covalent. The author continues to mention the sterospecific, spontaneous assembly of ribosomes and T4 bacteriophage from their protein constituents in vitro. Monod points out that the overall scheme/architectural plan of the multi-molecular complex is contained in the structure of its constituent parts and it is therefore able to spontaneously self assemble. Next Monod reviews the primary and tertiary structure of proteins. In reviewing the tertiary structure, what he calls the native shape, he talks about the non-covalent interactions which bind the amino acids and the folding that determines the molecules three dimensional shape including the sterospecific binding site. The author then writes that a primary structure exists in a single (or a small number of related states, as is the case with allosteric proteins) precisely defined conformational native state under normal physiological conditions. Prior to folding there is no biological activity. The sequence of the amino acid residues and the initial conditions determine the protein folding and therefore dictate the function. Monod splits up organism development into four broad stages: First the folding of the polypeptide sequence into globular proteins, then the association between proteins into organelles, thirdly the interactions between cells that make up tissue and organs, and lastly "coordination and differentiation of chemical activities via allosteric-type interactions" (Monod,95). Each stage is more highly ordered and results from spontaneous interactions between products of the previous stage and the initial source is the genetic information represented by the polypeptide sequences. The author then spends some time developing the fact that the preceding sequence of amino acids had no bearing on what the next amino acid will be. He says this "random" message seems to be composed haphazardly from a random origin and he ends the chapter poetically when he writes "Randomness caught on the wing, preserved, reproduced by the machinery of invariance and thus converted into order, rule, and necessity. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself" (Monod 98). Chapter six is entitled "Invariance and Perturbations”. The similarity throughout all organisms of chemical machinery in both structure and function is set out. In regards to structure, all living beings are made up of proteins and nucleic acids and these are the same residues (twenty amino acids and four nucleotides). Similar functions are carried out by the same sequence of reactions that appear in all organisms for essential chemical operations (some variations exist that consist of new utilizations of universal metabolic sequences). On page 104 Monod states "The fundamental biological invariant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, without any doubt constitute the most important discoveries ever made in biology." He adds that the full significance of the theory of natural selection was established by these discoveries. There is a brief review of DNA whose structure is a helix with translational and rotational symmetry and if artificially separated the complementary strands will spontaneously reform. A very brief review of DNA synthesis by DNA polymerase is given. The sequence of nucleotides in DNA defines the sequence of amino acids which in turn defines the folding of proteins which in turn defines an organism; "One must regard the total organism as the ultimate epigenetic expression of the genetic message itself" (Monod, 109). The author makes the point that translation is irreversible and never takes place from protein to DNA. In the last part of the chapter the author brings up the important subject of mutations. Various mutations such as substitutions, deletions, and inversions are listed. The accidental random chance of these mutations and that these unpredictable mutations alone that are the source of evolution is pointed out and exemplified. The "error" in the genetic message will be replicated with a high degree of fidelity. In the words of Monod "the same source of fortuitous perturbations, of ‘noise’...is the progenitor of evolution in the biosphere and accounts for its unrestricted liberty of creation, thanks to the replicative structure of DNA: that registry of chance, that tone-deaf conservatory where the noise is preserved along with the music" (Monod, 117). That mutations are unpredictable, faithfully replicated, and that natural selection operates only upon the products of chance is repeated at the start of chapter seven entitled "Evolution". Monod states that the decisive factor in natural selection is not the "struggle for life" but is the differential rate of reproduction and the only mutations "acceptable" to an organism are those that "do not lessen the coherence of the teleonomic apparatus, but rather, further strengthen it in its already assumed orientation" (Monod, 119). Monod explains that the teleonomic performance is judged through natural selection and this system retains only a very small fraction of mutations that will perfect and enrich the teleonomic apparatus. Monod gives the example of antibody development to show how chance combinations can give a well defined solution. He states that the source of information for the antibodies associative structure is not the antigen itself but is instead the result of many random recombinations of part of the antibody gene. The antibody that is able to bind to the antigen is multiplied. This remarkable example shows chance as the basis for one of the most precise adaptation phenomena. Monod makes the point that selection of a mutation is due to the environmental surroundings of the organism and the teleonomic performances. He then gives some examples to show the interconnection of specific performances/behaviors and anatomical adaptations. The author spends the rest of the chapter discussing linguistic and physical human evolutionary development. Language is an utterly different from the various auditory, tactile, and visual forms of communication in that it allows the communication of an original personal association to another individual. Monod hypothesizes that language was not merely the product but one of the driving forces for the evolution of our central nervous system. He believes that rudimentary symbolic communication appeared early on and created a new selective pressure that favored development of linguistic ability and hence the brain. He then talks about the evolution of our ancestors including the development of upright posture which allowed them to become hunters. Monod lastly points out the evidence to suggest the development of the cognitive function of language in children depends upon postnatal growth of the cortex. In chapter eight "The Frontiers" Monod captures the sense of wonderment one feels when considering the extraordinary diversity and complexity of organisms that has been brought about through billions of years of evolution when he says " The miracle stands "explained"; it does not strike us as any less miraculous" (Monod, 138). Three stages which led to the emergence of the first organism are proposed. First there must have been the formation of nucleotides and amino acids from simple carbon compounds and non-biological catalysts. Next would have been the formation of the first macromolecules capable of replication probably through spontaneous base pairing. And lastly the evolution of a teleonomic apparatus around the "replicative structures" would lead to the primitive cell. The author next turns his attention to the central nervous system. He lists the prime functions of the brain in mammals as control and coordination of neuromuscular activity, to set into action innate programs of action in response to stimuli, to integrate sensory inputs, to register, group, and associate significant events, and to represent and simulate. Monod makes the point that behavior cannot be strictly separated as learned or innate since elements are acquired through experience according to an innate program and "the programs structure initiates and guides early learning, which will follow a certain pre-established pattern defined by the species' genetic patrimony" (Monod, 153). The author now concentrates on what he views as one of the unique properties of higher level organisms, namely that of simulating experience subjectively so as to anticipate results and prepare action. Monod describes as "the frontier" the work that is to be done that will enable us to understand how this instrument of intuitive preconception works. He believes this understanding will enable mankind to eliminate the dualism of differentiating between the brain and the mind. He ends the chapter stating "To give up the illusion that sees in it an immaterial "substance" is not to deny the existence of the soul, but on the contrary to begin to recognize the complexity, the richness, the unfathomable profoundity of the genetic and cultural heritage and of the personal experience, conscious or otherwise, which together constitute this being of ours” (Monod, 159). The last chapter in the book is “The Kingdom and the Darkness”. Once man extended his domain over the subhuman sphere and dominated his environment the main threat became other men and tribal warfare came to be an important evolutionary selection factor and this would favor group cohesion. Cultural evolution affected physical evolution; “it is behavior that orients selective pressure” (Monod, 162). The author then says that due to the accelerating pace of cultural evolution, it no longer affects the genome and that selection does not favor the genetic survival of the fittest through a more numerous progeny. He brings up statistics that show a negative correlation between intelligence and the average number of children per couple and a positive correlation of intelligence between spouses which concentrates them among a shrinking elite. He also points to scientific and ethical advances that have allowed “genetic cripples” to live and reproduce (the author regards this as suspending natural selection). Monod says this suspension of natural selection is a peril to the species but that it will take quite a while for any serious effects and that there are more urgent dangers in modern society. He advances the idea “that nature is objective, that the systematic confronting of logic and experience is the sole source of true knowledge” (Monod, 165). He talks briefly about how ideas are selected based on the performance value and the spreading power (he states that ideas that explain man by assigning him a destiny spread the most). The author believes that we contain an inborn genetic need to search out the meaning of existence and that is responsible for the creation of myths, religion, and philosophy. He implies that this genetic component accounts for religion being the base of social structure and the reoccurrence of the same essential form in myths, religion, and philosophy. He admits that the idea of objective knowledge as the only source of truth may seem austere and unattractive in that it does not provide an explanation that will calm the anxiety of man; “It wrote an end to the ancient animist covenant between man and nature, leaving nothing in place of that precious bond but an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude” (Monod, 170). The author points to what he sees as the acceptance of objective science in practice but not in spirit. He says that the important message of science is that in the defining of a new source of truth which demands revision of ethical premises and a total break with the animist tradition. Our values are rooted in animism and are at odds with objective knowledge and truth. This jarring and isolating revelation places value judgments within the hands of man himself. Monod believes that objective truth and the theory of values cannot be separated “because the very definition of “true” knowledge reposes in the final analysis upon an ethical postulate” (Monod, 173). It is at this point that author’s argument turns upon itself by admitting that making objectivity the condition for true knowledge, which helps to separate value judgments from true knowledge and define science, is itself an axiomatic ethical choice. By asserting the principle of objectivity, which is accepted in modern science, one is choosing to adhere to what Monod calls the ethic of knowledge. The author proposes that man should rise above his need for explanation and fear of solitude to accept the ethic of knowledge and frames this ethic as accepting both the animal and ideal in man. Jacques Monod ends the book with his fundamental conclusion that “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below; it is for him to choose” (Monod, 180). |
In Limbo | null | null | In the first chapter Michael Carpenter awakes in a windowless institution. Although the regime in Limbo is quite liberal, Carpenter is not permitted to leave nor to know its purpose. Carpenter's fellow inmates are introduced: leftist intellectual Wright, corpulent joker Riley, fitness fanatic Treadwell and the nervous Sinnott. The highlights of Carpenter's time are his meetings with the glamorous Dr Dempster. The long second chapter details the inmates' increasing conflicts with their guards but is interspersed with flashbacks to Carpenter's earlier life. After leaving university, Carpenter has drifted from one dead-end job to another, and also moved between various unsatisfactory sexual relationships, with the strident feminist Veronica, the kleptomaniac Karen, married colleague Eleanor and the unstable Penny. The chaper ends with an escape attempt by all the inmates. The book concludes with a short third chapter describing Carpenter's first steps back in the outside world. |
Dougy | null | null | The story details the events surrounding an aboriginal family living in southwest Queensland, Australia. The story centers around Dougy and his sister Gracey, who has been selected for the State 100m running championships. The story opens with a flashback to a picture in Dougy's past of him and his family sitting by the riverbank in their town drinking. Dougy spends most of this time monologuing about his family and when a flood comes they have to try to escape. |
Skulduggery Pleasant | Derek Landy | 2,007 | Stephanie Edgley's novelist uncle dies, leaving her his vast mansion and the royalties from his best-selling books. At the reading of the will, a strange man in a tan overcoat, a hat, sunglasses and a scarf is present, who is left a piece of advice, along with Fergus and Beryl, Stephanie's none-too-liked aunt and uncle. Stephanie's aunt and uncle are given something as well: a seemingly useless brooch, a boat, and a car, which they both do not want. Spending a night alone in the mansion, Stephanie is attacked by a strange man, demanding she gives him a "key". As the man attacks Stephanie, the mysterious man in the tan overcoat from Gordon's funeral, known as Skulduggery Pleasant, arrives and saves her, throwing a fireball and then shooting the attacker. Skulduggery's disguise of a hat, wig and sunglasses fall off to reveal that he is an undead wizard, made up of only a skeleton held together by magic. He takes Stephanie as his partner and races to save the world from the Scepter of the Ancients, a mysterious staff located only in folklore. However, one of his old rivals has already retrieved it and Skulduggery may be too late to save the world, with or without Stephanie. There are many similarities to H. P. Lovecraft in the story. The Faceless Ones are likely inspired by the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft actually gets a mention by Skulduggery saying that his stories were inspired by myths about the Faceless Ones. Serpine also uses Lovecraft's name as an alias. |
The Hundred Year Lie | null | null | The book covers a wide range of topics to do with the issue. It starts by describing the myths that the public believes, that toxicity health issues are 'someone else's problem', and then goes on to talk about what is known to the scientific and chemical communities, and charts the history of the cover-up of chemicals in relation to human health, and the level of business made from this by the chemical companies. The book then goes on in detail about the dangers of food additives, the toxic threats of the processed food humans and animals currently eat, and how this chemical contamination has now affected the water that people drink, and how this has brought on increased biological changes, genetic mutations and newly discovered and increasing illnesses and diseases, in both human and animals. The book ends with a discussion on Western and Eastern medical approaches and philosophies, a focus on alternative medicine and eating healthily, avoiding synthetic foods, and a practical guide on how to detoxify one's body. |
The Mystery of the Great Pyramid Volume 2: The Chamber of Horus | null | null | Captain Blake having been assassinated at Athens Airport, Olrik seems to have won the first round. A furious Mortimer swears that he’ll never stop trying to avenge his friend. He goes on the hunt, but information is scarce. Sheik Abdel Razek, an old man with mysterious powers, protects him against Doctor Grossgrabenstein’s crew. The doctor is a devoted Egyptologist who has undertaken excavations not far from the Great Pyramid. Strange happenings occur and Mortimer may sometimes feel like he’s losing his way in this investigation that will lead him into the darkest depths of the Great Pyramid. |
Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle | null | null | Blocher begins by outlining the doctrine of Original Sin in its four parts. Universal sinfulness, the shared culpability of all humanity. Natural sinfulness, the innate or natural tendency to sin in people. Inherited sinfulness, the transmission of the Adam's original sin. Adamic sinfulness the idea that sin had its origin in the Garden of Eden with an act of rebellion by Adam, also known as "The Fall". Blocher then analyses the status of "The Fall" in the context of Genesis, modern science and a wider theological context. Blocher favours the 'framework' interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, which means he understands "The Fall" as a complex type of 'myth' containg historical elements such as Adam, Eve, the Garden itself and an actual act of original rebellion. The core of the book is centred around Blocher's discussion of Romans 5. In this chapter Blocher compares two common theological views of understanding the "The Fall" with some of his own ideas about the topic. Blocher concludes the book with two chapters about the significance of "The Fall" for humanity and the solution provided by the atonement of Jesus Christ. |
Venture to the Moon | Arthur C. Clarke | 1,956 | *"The Starting Line" tells of the launch of the first lunar expedition jointly by British, American and Russian rockets which have been assembled in Earth orbit. The plan is for all three ships to leave Earth orbit and land simultaneously, but the narrator has secretly been ordered to depart ahead of the other two ships. *"Robin Hood FRS" tells of the efforts by the joint expedition members to recover an automatic supply rocket that has landed just out of reach, through the unorthodox method of utilising one team member's archery skills. *"Green Fingers" describes how a Russian team member - a botanist - secretly engineers plant life that could survive on the Moon's surface, and the accident that causes his death. *"All that Glitters" deals with a geophysicist who discovers diamonds on the moon - only to learn that back on Earth, synthetic diamonds have just been successfully created at negligible cost. *"Watch this Space" tells how a scientific experiment conducted on the moon - creating a giant sodium cloud that is made luminescent by the sun's rays and visible from Earth - is sabotaged by "the greatest advertising coup" in history. *"A Question of Residence" tells of how at the end of the mission one of the ships would have to stay behind to clean up their equipment while the others return and get the early glory, and how the British team end up volunteering... in order to take advantage of a legal loophole so they can sell their stories tax-free. |
The Golden Rendezvous | Alistair MacLean | null | Aboard the cargo vessel converted into a luxury cruise ship SS Campari somewhere in the Caribbean, all is not well. For Johnny Carter, the Chief Officer, the voyage has already begun badly; but it's only when the Campari sails that evening, after a succession of delays attributable to sabotage that he realizes something is seriously wrong. A member of the crew is suddenly missing and the unsuccessful stem-to-stern search only increases tension. Then violence erupts and suddenly the whole ship is endangered by a master criminal whose intention is not a simple hijacking and ransoming of the wealthy hostages on board. Exactly what his goal is forms part of the mystery |
An Ice-Cream War | William Boyd | null | The story focuses on the battle fought in East Africa between British and German forces during World War I, and how it affects several individual people whose paths will eventually converge. The first character introduced is Walter Smith, an American expatriate farm owner/mechanic/engineer who runs a successful sisal plantation in British East Africa near Mount Kilimanjaro. Before war breaks out in August 1914, Smith is on cordial terms with his German half-English neighbour, Erich von Bishop. Smith even shops for coffee plant seedlings at the botanical garden in the capital of German East Africa, Dar es Salaam. Major von Bishop burns Smith's sisal and linseed plantation in the opening campaign of the Great War, and then dismantles the massive Decorticator, the industrial centrepiece of Smith's sisal farm operations. Now made a penniless refugee, and unable to secure any war reparations from the colonial British bureaucracy, Smith parks his wife and children with his missionary father-in-law and joins the British military forces in Nairobi, pursuing personal vengeance against von Bishop over the next four years of war in East Africa. The second narrative strand involves Felix Cobb, the studious youngest son of an aristocratic and traditional British military family, everyone of whom he despises apart from his older brother Gabriel, a captain. The latter soon marries his sweetheart Charis (inspiring a certain jealousy in Felix), but World War I breaks out while Gabriel is on his honeymoon in Normandy, and he makes haste back to his regiment. Gabriel is posted to Africa, where he befriends psychotic fellow soldier Bilderbeck and is quickly wounded by German soldiers. Whilst recovering in a POW hospital, he develops an infatuation for Erich von Bishop's plump, stubborn wife Liesl, who works there as a nurse... The novel could be considered a satire on the ineptitude of authority in wartime. A recurring character, English District Officer Wheech-Browning, spreads chaos wherever he goes, such that Smith observes that every time he goes somewhere with Wheech-Browning, someone in their company meets an unfortunate death. |
Armadillo | William Boyd | null | The story concerns Lorimer Black a successful loss adjuster, His original name is Milomre Blocj and he comes from a family of Transnistrian gypsies who arrived in London in 1957 and set up an import-export business to Eastern Europe. They now run a taxi cab firm and are always borrowing money off Milo (as they still call him). Lorimer suffers from insomnia and spends many nights at the "Institute for Lucid Dreaming" in search for a cure. He collects antique helmets, listens to African music and is having an affair with Stella Bull, the owner of a scaffolding company. The book includes extracts taken from Lorimers journal The Book of Transfiguration in which he philosophizes on his situation and quotes from Gerard de Nerval. Hogg, his overbearing boss describes his profession thus: "people turn to insurance to remove uncertainty from areas of their lives. Insurance companies turn to loss adjusters to put uncertainty into insurance, and thus reintroduce uncertainty to insured people". The narrative itself begins when he turns up at a routine business appointment only to find the man he was to meet has hanged himself. From then on his already complicated life begins to unravel as he falls in love with Flavia Malinervo an unhappily married actress, is assigned to investigate a case of suspected insurance fraud in which a colleague Torquil Helvoir-Jayne is implicated, and suffers the death of his father... |
Midnighters 2: Touching Darkness | Scott Westerfeld | 2,005 | Touching Darkness begins shortly after The Secret Hour ends. It starts with Jessica's meeting Jonathan in the secret hour. As they return home, Jonathan discovers a "stiff" - non-midnighter - outside Jessica's house, taking multiple exposures of her window across midnight. Meanwhile, Dess has been having strange dreams, which have led to some theories about co-ordinates affecting the secret hour. She discovers a GPS co-ordinate finder in her father's map drawer, and begins to use it to map the secret hour. Investigating Jessica's stalker, Melissa overhears someone thinking about Jessica. She and Rex visit his house in the secret hour and discover people there are using dominoes with lore symbols on them to communicate with the darklings at midnight, with the help of a 'halfling' -Anathea- a girl who has been merged with a darkling. Melissa discovers that the halfling is sick, and that the darklings will soon try to take Rex, another Seer, to replace her. They steal some of the dominoes so that the darklings will not be able to communicate about the Midnighters to their human allies. They also find that the house belongs to Ernesto Grayfoot - a cousin of Jessica's friend Constanza Grayfoot, who says that even though her grandfather used to live there, he left nearly fifty years ago - around the time the Midnighters seem to have disappeared from Bixby - and now the rest of her family avoid the town at all costs - her father was even cut off for moving there. Meanwhile, Dess discovers a house in which another Midnighter - Madeline - has lived hidden for nearly fifty years. Madeline explains that fifty years ago, when the town's population boomed suddenly, someone let out the secret of the Midnighters to an outsider - Constanza's grandfather - who learned how to communicate with the darklings, and got rich doing their bidding. The darklings used him to kill off the Midnighters, leaving only the new, younger generation, who were seen as harmless with no one older to teach them. They also made the halfling using a young girl called Anathea, to communicate with the darklings better. She also explains that her house is in a contortion in the secret hour which hides her, and that Dess must keep the knowledge of it hidden from the others so that the darklings do not find it. After ransacking Constanza's house, the Midnighters learn that the darklings are trying to prevent a new runway being built outside Bixby. From Madeline, Dess learns that she needs to get Jessica's help in scouring the site of the runway with light: it is the only place halflings can be made, and light will destroy it. However, before she manages it, Rex is kidnapped. Dess draws a map to where they will find him, then suppresses the memories using a trick Madeline taught her so that Melissa will not learn about Madeline from her mind. However, Melissa suspects Dess is hiding something, and touches her, giving herself full access to Dess's memories. She learns about Madeline, and Dess begins to resent her for the intrusion on her privacy. When the secret hour begins, Jonathan, Melissa, Jessica and Dess are only a mile from the spot Rex has been taken, but Melissa is injured when she continues through the windshield when the car stops abruptly at the start of the secret hour. Jessica and Jonathan go ahead and find Anathea, freed from the darkling, who tells them that Rex is already a halfling. Luckily, they catch up with him, and Jessica uses her torch to burn away the darkling flesh, making him (mostly) human again. They return to Anathea, who dies from the darkness after Jonathan grants her last wish to fly again. They leave her in front of the Grayfoots, along with a message spelled out in English: 'You're next'. Finally, Madeline introduces herself to all of the Midnighters - as soon as Melissa knew about her, the darklings could read it from her mind. She begins to teach Melissa how to mindcast properly. Meanwhile, Rex is struggling to come to terms with his enhanced abilities; his time as a halfling has left him with the darkling's ability to sense human thoughts and emotions, as well as a desire to hunt. |
The Troika | Stepan Chapman | 1,997 | The novel introduces three beings - a jeep, a dinosaur, and an old Mexican woman - travelling across a desert under the glare of three suns. They have been travelling for centuries though they do not know why they are crossing the desert or if they will ever reach the other side. The characters have each changed bodies several times. Their travels are interspersed with dream-sequence-like flashbacks describing various transformed versions of the 20th Century. |
The Survivors of the 'Jonathan' | Jules Verne | null | The novel tells the story of a mysterious man named Kaw-djer. Kaw-djer lives in the land of Magellania, that is, the region around the Straits of Magellan. Kaw-djer, whose motto is "Neither God nor master", helps himself survive and also provides assistance to the indigenous peoples of Magellania. However, when a group of settlers is shipwrecked on a nearby island (Hoste Island), Kaw-djer assists them establish their colony, though he refuses to rule over them or control them in any way. However, when the colony falls victim to fight for power, Kaw-djer is forced to temporarily abandon his own anarchistic principles. After he restores order, he abdicates and becomes a lighthouse-keeper, thereby retaining his individualism. |
The Blue Afternoon | William Boyd | null | Los Angeles, 1936 Kay Fischer is an architect who has recently been defrauded by her ex-partner, Eric Meyerson. As such, she is trying to start her architectural practice again on her own. She still keeps in contact with Philip, her ex-husband and an unsuccessful Hollywood script writer, from whom she got divorced after the death of their baby son who had a hole in his heart. Kay learns that an old man has been enquiring about her and she is confronted by a Dr Salvador Carriscant who tells her that he is her father. Thinking him a crank, she asks her mother, Annaliese Leys, more questions about her real father, Hugh Paget, an Englishman, missionary and teacher who died in a fire in German New Guinea in 1903. Carriscant tells his daughter than he wants her to find a man called Paton Bobby in connection with a murder that happened in the distant past. Through a contact of Philip's, they track him down at his ranch south of Sante Fe. They take a journey together to visit him and Kay is astounded by the reaction of both men when they are re-united but Carriscant tells her very little about what is discussed. However, he does show her an old photograph taken at the Aishlie Tennis Cup, and says that he needs to find the woman in it – the wife of an embassy official - who is now living in Lisbon, Portugal and states that he would like her to go with him to try to locate her. Kay, in the meantime, is distracted by the sale of the house she has finished building; it was to be hers but she has to sell it to help keep her company afloat. She shows a Mrs Luard Turner around it and the sale is completed. She also takes her mother to Carriscant's boarding house, telling her she believes him to be a private detective hired by Meynard, and her mother states she has never seen him before although Kay can tell she is lying by her apparent lack of interest in who he is. She then visits a new site she is planning to develop with her foreman, Larry Rugola, and on the way back they drop in on 2265 Micheltorreno, only to find it being knocked down by Eric Meyerson, who tells Kay that they are going to build a very similar house there but with a different architect. Feeling down in the dumps, Kay decides to take up her 'father's' offer of the trip to Lisbon - vital for him as he does not have the finances to pay for the trip. However, in return her father has to tell her all about his family and the next part of the book is about his life in Manila in the Philippines. Carriscant is the son of Archibald Carriscant, a Scotsman and railway engineer, who married Juliana, the daughter of a local 'mestizo' landowner. After studying medicine at Glasgow University, during which time Archibald died, their son Salvador returned to Manila to set up his practice in 1897. Manila, 1902 Dr Salvador Carriscant becomes the most celebrated surgeon in the Philippines, working at the San Jeronimo Hospital in Manila. However, he is in a strong rivalry with the hospital's director, Dr Cruz, who is totally against the new surgical methods of Listerism introduced by Salvador, preferring to work in Salvador's eyes as 'an antediluvian sawbones cum sinister circus performer'. Salvador's work is made easier because of his highly trained Filipino anethetist, Pantaleon Quiroga, who assists him in every operation at San Jeronimo. Quiroga is also an aeroplane enthusiast; he has built and housed one in his newly built 'nipa' barn and shows it one day to Carriscant. The surgeon is paid a surprise visit by Paton Bobby, Chief of Constabulary and asked to accompany him to examine the dead body of a young American marine called Ephraim Ward. The corpse is taken by them to the hospital mortuary and put on ice. In the meantime, Salvador returns home to his wife, Annaliese, with whom he has fallen out of love and not slept with for a whole year. The next day, he discovers that the 'peninsularo' Dr Isidro Cruz has removed the body and so he and Bobby visit the Dr's house near the small village of Flores to recover. He tells them he has it owing to lack of room in the hospital morgue and both men are disgusted by the unhygienic conditions of the Spaniard's domestic operating theatre. Carriscant decides to take a whore in one of the brothels in Gardenia Street in the Sampaloc district. However, he meets the drunk American military doctor, Wieland, in the Ice-Cream Parlor and has to tell a lie about visiting his cook’s mother for her hernia. He tries to leave but is trapped in the backyard of the whorehouse. Eventually, he scrambles over the wall and on his way back home in the early hours of the morning is nearly killed by a stray arrow. He remonstrates with the American woman doing target practice and finds he is bowled over by her looks. He asks Bobby who she might be, saying his wife met her at a church function, and the policeman thinks it is the Headmistress of the Gerlinger School. Carriscant goes to the school and is told by the nuns she is walking at the Luneta where the islanders parade in the evening. He spots her and finds an opportunity to speak to her but she rebuffs him, stating that her name is not Rudolfa as he presumes – one of the men calls her Delphine and, seeing that there might be some trouble, Carriscant is obliged to leave. Paton Bobby comes to see Carriscant as another body has been found – this time a soldier called Corporal Maximilian Braun, and Carriscant also meets a young American Colonel called Sieverance. Salvador examines the body and notes that the heart has been removed. They then visit Governor Taft’s office in the Malacanan Palace to update him on the situation and Carriscant gives him his negative opinion about Dr Wieland’s abilities. Carriscant is hauled before Cruz and Wieland for a dressing down and a fight ensues between the three men whose enmity has now spilled over. The doctor is then summoned by a note to Jepson Sieverance’s house and here he re-encounters Delphine, the Colonel’s wife who is suffering from acute appendicitis. Cruz and Wieland appear to examine her but Carriscant persuades her to ignore their misinformed medical opinions and she is taken to San Jeronimo where he successfully performs and operation on her, also thrilled to be able to see and touch her naked body whilst she is under an anaesthetic. Delphine Sieverance makes a slow but sure recovery and Salvador visits her at her house as a patient. She appears very glad to see him and also gives him a novel to read in order that he may return it to her at a later date. Sieverance’s regiment is called away to fight the insurgents and Salvador visits Calle Lagarda once more – as he is putting the book back in the library he trips and falls and falls into Delphine and they now recognise their attraction to each other. One day at his hospital, he is visited by Mrs Sieverance who is complaining of a pain in her abdomen. She is undressed by Salvador in private on his examination couch and they make love to each other. A third body is now discovered, that of a poor female slum dweller who is four months pregnant. A scalpel is found by her body and Bobby asks Carriscant if one is missing from his hospital. Carriscant does an inventory check and discovers there is. He informs Bobby and also tells him that he believes it was planted next to the body by Cruz and Wieland to implicate him in the murder. Bobby dismisses this as fanciful but tells him that he believes the murderer could be Cruz as his family came from Batangas in southern Luzon where the rebellion was fiercest. Back at the hospital he is summoned to Cruz’s side of the hospital and Cruz shows him a man with an exposed beating heart that has six sutures in it, believing this to be a great scientific experiment until Carriscant informs him it was already performed seven years earlier in Germany. Carriscant and his wife attend an official reception given by Governor Taft and his wife and here he meets Delphine once again and they arrange another meeting. They meet and he tries to make love to her again but she is concerned about the servants and pushes him away. However, Delphine comes to Carriscant’s surgery once more and they make love again, and she tells him about her life and marriage to Sieverance to whom she now only feels apathy. As they are leaving, they are interrupted by Pantaleon and Carriscant reveals his love. Panteleon understands the situation and lends the couple his ‘nipa’ barn in the afternoons for their assignments. One day, the doctor receives a note from Delphine asking to meet her on the Luneta and she reveals to him that she is pregnant. He later encounters Sieverance and learns that they are to return to the USA, so he dashes round to see Delphine and is forced to set fire to a shed in her friend’s garden to interrupt the bridge party she is attending and tells her he has a plan that will resolve their situation. Annaliese is remorseful over her coldness towards her husband and effects a reconciliation by sleeping with him again. In the meantime, Carriscant goes to see Nicanor Axel, who has smuggled in an engine for Pantaleon’s plane to avoid the duty, and arranges for two passengers to leave on his boat. He is interrupted in his consulting rooms by Pantaleon who tells him that the Amberway-Richault flying prize is taking place in Paris on 30 May 1903 and that they must complete their flight first. Carriscant refuses to be his passenger, stating that he would be terrified but Pantaleon is by now totally obsessive and threatens to reveal his affair. The test flight of Drs Pantaleon Quiroga, accompanied by Dr Salvador Carriscant, finally takes place from the ‘nipa’ barn attended by a sizeable crowd. The machines launches itself into the air and flies over the mark and much higher than they expected before finally crashing by the San Roque creek – Salvador is severely winded and Pantaleon dead. Now, in his grief, the doctor puts his plan into effect. One evening he is visited by Sieverance and Delphine, to whom he has given cordite to make her appear ill. He takes her into the operating theatre and gives the Colonel a glass of rum laced with chloral. He then puts the woman into an ice chest to make her look dead white and covers himself and his theatre with blood, before telling Sieverance that his wife has died and showing him her body. He also shows him the dead body of a five month old foetus and Sieverance breaks down. After taking the Colonel home, he returns to Delphine and warms her up before sending her in a carriage to Axel’s boat. However, just as he is readying himself to leave – pretending that he is going to his mother’s house for two weeks – he is arrested by Paton Bobby and his constables for the murder of Sieverance, whose body has been found with two bullet holes in its head. Lisbon, 1936 The ending consists of Carriscant and Kay arriving in Lisbon and the reader will have to read the story to find out if their search for the mystery woman is successful and why Carriscant is looking for her. |
His Name is... Savage | null | null | That sole story, "The Return of the Half-Man", is a science-fiction spy thriller concerning a cyborg renegade military general named Mace who kidnaps the U.S. president and impersonates him at a United Nations assembly in an attempt to ignite a world war. The story and art were more graphically violent than comic books and movies of the day, is with one panel showing a pulped and bloody crushed hand and another showing a metal gun-barrel smashing through a man's teeth and sending teeth flying. "Savage depends on only two things: guys and his .357 magnum, which he has no compunction about using," one critic wrote of the 1982 reissue."Broken noses, splintering teeth, and splattering brains are all depicted in lurid detail They are part and parcel of Savage's obdurate attempts to stop a madman from instigating World War III. Although this is an old theme, Kane and Goodwin present a tale that is riveting and upsettingly believable." |
The Summoner | null | 2,007 | Martris "Tris" Drayke, second son of the royal family of Margolan, has always been tormented by his older half-brother, Jared Drayke. When Jared murders their father and seizes the throne with the help of his vampire (vayash moru) mage, Foor Arontala, Martris flees the city with his two friends: the bard Carroway and the soldier Soterius. Also, a gruff captain of the guard joins them. As the friends journey on the road to a nearby country to the north, Tris begins to experience powers he didn't know he had, magic left to him by his extremely powerful grandmother, Bava K'aa. As the story progresses, Tris learns that he is the mage heir of Bava K'aa, inheriting all of her former powers of summoning spirits, and perhaps more. As his brother's soldiers close in, Tris hires on the ex-soldier Vahanian, who now lives on the wrong side of the law. Vahanian is haunted by a horrific past, and has sworn not to involve himself in the conflicts of government again. However, through the course of the novel, Vahanian begins to see the urgency of mission's success, after witnessing the horrors King Jared and Arontala inflict upon their own country. He, reluctantly, at first, agrees to train Tris and his friends in the art of streetfighting, breaking them of their rehearsed, almost ceremonial ways of swashbuckling. He teaches them how to kill, not put on a show. Princess Kiara, leader of the small country of Isencroft, for all intents and purposes, finds herself in a bind as she struggles to worm her way out of an arranged marriage with Jared, and worries about her father's failing health, which is almost certainly waning because of evil magic. In a last bid for her country's freedom, she rides upon a Journey given to her by the Eight-Faced Goddess. She ends up joining Tris's band, and rides with him to an almost-forgotten library to discover how she might save her father, and her nigh-doomed country. While there, Kiara is attacked by Arantola, and Tris continues his training under Roysten the Librarian and other Sisters, eventually gaining MageSlayer, a powerful sword guarded by the dead. It is the only blade capable of killing the dead. During this time, Kiara and Tris begin to fall for each other, and Kiara is bidden by the Goddess to assist in their quest. Vahanian and Carina also show signs of romantic feelings, though Carina is desperate to deny them because of something in her past. They then set off for Principality, but they are detained by King Staden of Principality's soldiers, and it is revealed the general of the troops is the brother of the man Carina fell in love with and failed to save when she and her brother were forced out their home for being twins, and mages to boot. Once at the royal court though, the King reveals he escorted them for safety as they saved his daughter Berwyn (Berry), and Vahanian is made Lord of Dark Haven, the vayash moru stronghold as a reward. The king pledges his full support, and Kiara and Tris admit their feelings before Tris goes to continues his training. |
Midnighters 3: Blue Noon | Scott Westerfeld | 2,005 | When time freezes in the middle of the day during a school pep rally, the Midnighters have a problem. The secret hour is slowly making its way into the real world. The last book in the Midnighters trilogy is all about the adventure of trying to keep the secret hour in the secret hour. The Midnighters begin to experience the secret hour more and more frequently during daylight hours. To make matters worse, Rex's darkling side cannot always control itself, and may be becoming stronger. By using Madeline and other resources, the Midnighters find out that on the night of Samhain (Halloween), the Secret Hour will expand, and more of the Earth will be sucked up. This is because there is a "rip" in true midnight, which allows non-midnighters to slip into the blue time, that is expanding like a seam in fabric. While trying to keep people out of these dangerous zones, Jessica has some trouble with her curious little sister Beth. True midnight (usually confined to the secret hour) will last for the whole day, and all humans and creatures within it will be awake, no longer 'stiff'. This will allow the darklings to feast once again upon the creatures of day-unless the five teens find a way to stop it from happening. When Jessica and her boyfriend Jonathan manage to stop the "blue time" from spreading to the whole world, Jessica unfortunately gets sucked into the "blue time". To Jonathan and the whole Midnighter's teams dismay, she will forever be trapped in the blue time, only able to live for an hour of every day. Jessica's parents become very sad about their daughter's "disappearance" and are still grieving her loss when Beth comes to visit Jess for the last time. Both sisters share an emotional time with each other before Jonathan has his moment to say goodbye. Finally, with a half-hour to spare, Jonathan takes Jessica and Beth on their last flight through the blue time. |
The Bookshop | Penelope Fitzgerald | 1,978 | The novel, set mainly in 1959, centres around Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small fictional town of Hardborough, Suffolk. The location chosen is the Old House, an abandoned, damp house said to be infested by ghosts. With many sacrifices, the business starts and grows for about a year, after which sales slump. Florence Green has a contention with the influential Mrs Gamart, who wanted to set up an arts centre in the Old House. Mrs Gamart's nephew, a member of Parliament, manages to pass a bill that empowered local councils to buy any historical building that had been left uninhabited for five years. Eventually also the Old House is purchased and Florence Green evicted. |
The Beast House | Richard Laymon | null | Teenager Janice Crogan finds a diary belonging to a previous owner of Beast House, a local tourist attraction in the girl's hometown of Malcasa Point, where numerous gruesome murders have allegedly taken place. The journal features lurid sex scenes between the beast and its author, the house's prior owner. Janice sends an excerpt from the book to famed (fictitious) author Gorman Hardy, who decides to travel to Malcasa Point, along with an accomplice named Brian Blake, in order to steal the book and publish it himself. Meanwhile, Tyler and Nora, two young women on vacation together, decide to track down an old flame of Tyler's, Dan Jenson, who is now a patrolman living in Malcasa Point. On the way there, they run into Jack and Abe, two ex-Marines who save them from a crazed driver with a serious case of road rage. Back in town, Gorman agrees to Janice's proposal that she get half the profits from Gorman's proposed book based on the journal, then sends her off with Blake to take photos of Beast House so that he can break into Janice's room at the local inn (run by her parents) and steal the contract entitling her to half the money. While Gorman commits his act of attempted burglary, Blake and Janice are in the woods behind Beast House having sex, but then the beast attacks, kills Blake, and kidnaps Janice. A bit later, Janice's parents confront Gorman and demand to know their daughter's whereabouts. The three set out for Beast House, eventually discovering Blake's mutilated body, and Janice's father attacks Gorman, who murders both him and Janice's mother, hoping their deaths will also be attributed to the beast. Meanwhile, Tyler and Nora are told by a neighbor that Dan Jenson can be found at Beast House. They encounter Gorman Hardy while on the Beast House tour, where Tyler is horrified to discover that Dan is one of the beast's previous victims. No longer hindered, she starts a relationship with Abe. Back at the inn, Gorman offers Jack and Abe a thousand dollars to explore Beast House and get photographs. Breaking into the house, Abe and Jack eventually discover a tunnel connecting Beast House to the home of Maggie Kutch, the tourist trap's current owner, the woman who runs the tours of Beast House. Janice awakens and realizes she's been raped by the beast, and encounters Sandy and Donna, the mother and daughter survivors from The Cellar, who've been subjected to similar treatment. Jack and Abe kill one of the beasts, and another one kills Gorman, who came to the house with Tyler and Nora. Maggie Kutch is killed and Janice and Donna are rescued, but Sandy disappears. Some time later, Tyler and Abe are apparently married, with a child, and living at a hotel owned by Abe's father. Janice Crogan has written a bestselling book about her experiences at Beast House. Sandy's whereabouts are still unknown. |
No Way to Treat a First Lady | Christopher Buckley | 2,002 | The President of the United States and Hollywood bombshell Babette Van Anka, are carrying on an extramarital affair in the White House. After a night of cheating, the president is confronted by his wife, Beth MacMann. The two get into a fight, during which she throws a historic Paul Revere spittoon at the president. The spittoon strikes the President in the head and it is alleged he later dies from the injuries. The case is instantly declared the "Trial of the Millennium". The first lady decides that to win the case, she must hire the most expensive and unscrupulous attorney in Washington. The attorney who fits the bill, Boyce Baylor, happens to be her former lover from law school. Baylor accepts her case and the trial becomes a media circus, with most of the media instantly concluding the First Lady is guilty. Baylor's courtroom theatrics are planned to impress the court of public opinion as much as the jury. Incessant media coverage of the trial smothers attempts of the new President to accomplish anything serious. Baylor and MacMann rekindle their long-lost love affair, but Baylor's shenanigans soon find him barred from the courtroom. The trial appears lost until Van Anka confesses under oath that she had secretly administered a large dose of Viagra to the president. An autopsy confirmed that the Viagra caused the death. MacMann is declared not guilty. She and Baylor have a baby which, coincidentally, weighs the same amount as the spittoon. The media is quick to declare that they believed the first lady was innocent all along. |
S.O.S. Meteors: Mortimer in Paris | Edgar Pierre Jacobs | null | The world’s weather has gone mad, Professor Mortimer responds on an invitation of his friend Professor Labrousse, while travelling to his friend, Mortimer's cab crashes and he finds himself a new adventure right on his friends doorstep. |
The Islamist | Ed Husain | 2,007 | Husain fondly describes his early years at William Burrough primary school in the 1980s, where he plays with 'Jane, Lisa, Andrew, Mark, Alia, Zak' and learns about Islam from his family and his family's Bengali spiritual guide Shaikh Abd al-Latif (Fultholy Saheb) (p. 9) he called 'Grandpa'. In the early 1990s Husain goes to Stepney Green, a boys school that was virtually all-Muslim and dominated by immigrants and gangs, and dubbed the "worst school in Britain" by the tabloid press (p. 7). He has few friends and feels himself a "boffin" misfit, but finds some satisfaction in studying Islam along with a new friend Brother Falik. Their text, Islam: Beliefs and Teachings, by Ghulam Sarwar, is "the first book I read about Islam in English." He had been taught by his father that Islam and politics didn't mix, but Sarwar preached that 'Religion and politics are one and the same in Islam', and this became the "one part of the book has stayed with me." Later, Husain felt misled by Sarwar. As he explained: "What I did not know at school was that Sarwar was a business management lecturer, not a scholar of religion. And he was an activist in the organisations that he mentioned [ Muslim Brotherhood and Jamat-e-Islami]. Sarwar's book was not the dispassionate educational treatise it purported to be." He added: "he was also the brains behind the separation of Muslim children from school assemblies into what we called 'Muslim assembly', managed by the Muslim Educational Trust (MET) [of which Sarwar is the Director]. What seemed like an innocuous body was, in fact, an organisation with an agenda. In my school, a Jamat-e-Islamic activist named Abdul Rabb represented the MET and awarded us trophies and medals for our performance in MET exams. Ostensibly it all seemed harmless, but the personnel all belonged to Jamat-e-Islami front organisations in Britain. Their key message was that Islam was not merely a religion but also an ideology that sought political power and was beginning to make headway." At the invitation of Brother Falik he becomes active in the Young Muslims Organisation which had a large following at East London Mosque and was associated with Jamaat-e-Islami and Islamist leader Abul Ala Maududi. His family strongly opposes the political Islam of Jamaat-e-Islami. When his father makes him choose between Islam and the family, Husain runs away, finally coming back when his father backs down and allows him to continue visiting the East London Mosque. Later he moves on to Hizb ut-Tahrir, another Islamist group with a more intellectual and international outlook that emphasizes the need to reestablish an Islamic Caliphate unifying the Muslim world, or ummah, in one unified state. After two years in HT he drops out and attends meetings of the Islamic Society of Britain, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.. Husain writes that in the mid-1990s, he became disillusioned with Islamic groups in the UK and more interested in the relatively nonpolitical Islamic scholars Hamza Yusuf and Nuh Ha Mim Keller. After a period working for HSBC, Husain moves with his wife to Damascus to study Arabic and teach English at the British Council. Still teaching for the British Council they move to Jeddah Saudi Arabia to be close to Mecca and Medina. There he becomes disillusioned by "the naked poverty" and inequality which he feels makes a mockery of his early belief in the solidarity of the ummah. All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. .... Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used the word “nigger” to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist. Also disillusioning was the lack of chaste behavior and respect for women In supermarkets I only had to be away from Faye [his wife] for five minutes and Saudi men would hiss or whisper obscenities as they walked past. .... We had heard stories of the abduction of women from taxis by sex-deprived Saudi youths. At a Saudi friend’s wedding at a luxurious hotel in Jeddah, women dared not step out of their hotel rooms and walk to the banqueting hall for fear of abduction by the bodyguards of a Saudi prince who also happened to be staying there. .... Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? Husain returns to London after the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Husain criticises Islamism and argues that the desire for the re-establishment of an Islamic caliphate is borne out of an alien, Wahhabi or extremist interpretation of Islam. The idea of a pure Islamic state, is 'not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)'. The ideas of HT founder Nabhani "were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought," including the anti-liberal democrat Rousseau. Husain writes in The Islamist of his former association with Inayat Bunglawala, Dhiren Barot and Omar Bakri Muhammad. Husain finally severs his links with Islamism by "rediscovering what he describes as 'classical, traditional Islam', which includes Sufi mysticism." According to observers, The Islamist highlights the "paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies." |
Crispin: At the Edge of the World | Edward Irving Wortis | 2,006 | At the conclusion of the Newbery Award–winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead, Bear and Crispin are free to follow new lives. Though Crispin’s endurance, courage, faith, and honor have been continually tested, he has learned many lessons from his mentor, Bear. But Bear has been both wounded and weakened by his ordeals, and is tended to by an elderly wise woman, Aude, and her apprentice, Troth. Crispin learns to trust these strangers in spite of their allegiance to unfamiliar gods. When Aude is killed by a fearful, ignorant mob, Crispin rescues Troth, and the three set off for a safer land. They come upon the coastal town of Rye just one week after a brutal attack by the French and Castilians. While working in Rye, Bear continues to regain a measure of his former strength, until he is again hunted by his former friends, members of Ball’s brotherhood. Bear’s makeshift family consisting of Crispin and Troth—set sail for Flanders, only to be shipwrecked on the French coast. A “free” company of English soldiers, whose loyalty is only to their own gain, usurps the bedraggled threesome. Their leader, Richard Dudley, has his eye on treasure and inflicts the same atrocities on a French town that his countrymen are still reeling from in Rye. In order to loot the treasures of the local church, Dudley enlists the diminutive Troth to gain entrance through a drain, and Bear is held hostage. They rescue bear and set off for iceland. |
No Love For Johnnie | Wilfred Fienburgh | null | Stylistically the novel belongs to the genre associated with John Osborne, John Braine, Shelagh Delaney and other realist writers who were to find their voices in the new wave of British "verismo" art forms. The narrative allows the reader to examine the internal conflicts that Johnnie Byrne negotiates as he attempts to find some merit in his desultory existence. Under scrutiny are his relationships with his cold, politically driven wife, Alice, whose own politics are a point of contention for Johnnie. His neighbour, Mary and the young woman, Pauline illuminate Byrne's darker aspects. As a piece of literature it may be considered light weight but re-readings will reveal a tight structure and a credible analysis of the way powerful individuals, the makers of social change, are paradoxically vulnerable cyphers in a world where they too may be ill-served by cupidity. Even though the weak ending of his relationship with a much younger woman may seem cliched and trite by twenty-first century standards, it is handled with a certain amount of legerdemain and irony so that it escapes being trite. There is a sense that Byrne lands on his feet by his very own inaction in political matters. By the novels' end, it is clear that Byrne himself has failed to influence his own life. and appears to be a pawn at the mercy of events around him. |
Venusberg | Anthony Powell | null | Dissatisfied with life and love in London, Lushington, a journalist, secures a posting in the Baltic and sets sail. Before he even reaches the new country, onboard ship he has met and become thoroughly entangled with many of the characters who will affect his immediate future, including Ortrud Mavrin, the Russian counts, Scherbatcheff and Bobel, and Baroness Puckler. Once in the Baltic, Lushington finds himself sharing accommodations with the other party involved in the love triangle that first provoked him into leaving England, one Da Costa. Lushington is soon thoroughly involved in personal and political intrigues, meeting various diplomats, representatives of the State Police, the intrusive valet, Pope (whose name ironically recalls the role played by the Pope in the Tannhäuser legend), the American diplomat Curtis Cortney–even Frau Mavrin's little child who "looks like his father, curiously enough." Melancholy, shyness and embarrassment dominate the novel, suffusing even those scenes involving sudden violence with a sense of bemused, slightly detached sadness. Lushington's eventual return to England is set against a continued background of misunderstanding and social ineptitude which make clear that Powell has not simply been satirizing how things happen "on the Continent." |
The Brick Moon | Edward Everett Hale | 1,869 | "The Brick Moon" is written as if it were a journal. It describes the construction and launch into orbit of a sphere, 200 ft. in diameter, built of bricks. It is intended as a navigational aid, but is accidentally launched with people aboard. They survive, and so the story also provides the first known fictional description of a space station. |
The Program | null | 2,004 | The work is part of a series following the character Tim Rackley, a member of the United States Marshals Service, and opens with a suicide in the La Brea Tar Pits. Rackley must rescue the daughter of a Hollywood producer from a dangerous mind control cult, by infiltrating the group. Charismatic leader TD Betters had created his own society based on self-help tenets, and Rackley must navigate through it without getting pulled in himself. The novel describes a fictional large group awareness training called "The Program", In the novel, the seminar leader had "married two cult models", which one of the protagonists describes as a blend of the "psychotherapeutic cult", and the "self-improvement cult". The character then tells his friend that "The Program", is similar to a combination of the Sullivanians and Lifespring. Werner Erhard is quoted, prior to the opening of the prologue. |
A Hope in the Unseen | Ron Suskind | 1,998 | At Ballou Senior High, a school besieged by violence in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it—and it does. The summer after his junior year, at a program for minorities at MIT, he gets a fleeting glimpse of life outside, a glimpse that turns into a face-on challenge one year later: acceptance into Brown University, an Ivy League school. At Brown, finding himself far behind most of the other freshmen, Cedric must manage a bewildering array of intellectual and social challenges. Cedric had hoped that at college he would finally find a place to fit in, but he discovers he has little in common with either the white students, many of whom come from privileged backgrounds, or the middle-class blacks. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric is left to rely on his faith, his intelligence, and his determination to keep alive his hope in the unseen—a future of acceptance and reward that he struggles, each day, to envision. |
Somewhere in Time | Richard Matheson | 1,975 | Richard Collier is a 36-year-old screenwriter who has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and has decided, after a coin flip, to spend his last days hanging around the Hotel del Coronado. Most of the novel represents a private journal he is continually updating throughout the story. He becomes obsessed with the photograph of a famous stage actress, Elise McKenna, who performed at the hotel in the 1890s. Through research, he learns that she never married, that she had an overprotective manager named William Fawcett Robinson, and that she seemed to have had a brief affair with a mysterious man while staying at this hotel in 1896. The more Richard learns, the more he becomes convinced that it is his destiny to travel back in time and become that mysterious man. Through research (see below), he develops a method of time travel that involves using his mind to transport himself into the past. After much struggle, he succeeds. At first, he experiences feelings of disorientation and constantly worries that he'll be drawn back to the present, but soon the feelings dissipate. He is unsure what to say to Elise when he finally does meet her, but to his surprise she immediately asks, "Is it you?" (She later explains that two psychics told her she would meet a mysterious man at that exact time and place.) Without telling her where (or, rather, when) he comes from, he pursues a relationship with her, while struggling to adapt himself to the conventions of the time. Inexplicably, his daily headaches are gone, and he believes that his memory of having come from the future will ultimately disappear. But Robinson, who assumes that Richard is simply after Elise's wealth, hires two men to abduct Richard and leave him in a shed while Elise departs on a train. Richard manages to escape and make his way back to the hotel, where he finds that Elise never left. They go to a hotel room and passionately make love. In the middle of the night, Richard leaves the room and bumps into Robinson. After a brief physical struggle, Richard quickly runs back into the room, and he casually picks a coin out of his pocket. Realizing too late that it is a 1970s coin, the sight of it pushes him back to the present. At the end of the book, we find out that Richard died soon after. A doctor claims that the time-traveling experience occurred only in Richard's mind, the desperate fantasy of a dying man, but Richard's brother, who has chosen to publish the journal, is not completely convinced. |
Mister B. Gone | Clive Barker | 2,007 | The story begins by immediately breaking the fourth wall, telling the reader to "Burn this book!" It is revealed that the narrator is some sort of presence trapped within the novel. The presence understands that the reader isn't going to burn the book without hearing some sort of story, and so it begins to tell its tale. The narrator reveals himself as a lesser demon named Jakabok Botch, who lived a traumatized childhood in Hell, especially due to his brutish, physically abusive demon of a father. To prevent himself from losing his mind, Jakabok decides to write violent, hate-filled papers in which he commits torture and patricide. Eventually, his mother comes across these papers, and confronts Jakabok, telling him that she wishes he was never born. She commands that he burn the papers immediately, and Jakabok reluctantly obeys. While watching the papers burn, Jakabok passes out and lands face down in the fire. His father either fails to notice or simply ignores his son's anguish, choosing to beat his mother instead. Jakabok is later dragged from the flames by his father, severely burnt and disfigured. Fearing further abuse, Jakabok seizes a knife and flees, eventually coming across a peculiar sight: raw steak and beer, hanging as though it is on a fishing wire. The sight causes Jakabok's pursuing father to forget about inflicting pain on his son, approaching the free meal. It is revealed that the steak and beer is hanging from fishing wire, and Jakabok and his father are caught in the trap. They are "reeled" out of Hell. While ascending, Jakabok's father threatens and curses his son as Jakabok starts cutting away at his father's net, attempting to make it so his father, Pappy Gatmuss, will fall to his death (for if Gatmuss and Jakabok is brought to wherever it is they are being dragged, Gatmuss will kill Jakabok for sure.) Seeing Jakabok attempt to kill him, Gatmuss tries to play for sympathy, lying about his love for his son in order to gain pity. As they breach the first circle of hell, they see the crack they are being dragged into, which causes Gatmuss to panic and become hysteric (he seems to fear the light.) He struggles in his nets, which causes the already weakened ropes to snap, and Jakabok's father fatally falls back into Hell while Jakabok is dragged into the realm of the living. Emerging, Jakabok finds himself in the 14th century, under the captivity of a corrupt priest and his partners. They begin to "judge Jakabok's worth", when he decides to run off into the forest. He approaches a young girl - one of the partners' daughters - in the midst of unholy ground, which is covered in demonic gore. He instantly falls in love, and asks if she would like to run off with him. She defies him, and so he smacks her face into the burning cauldron which she is working by. The priests' partners, who had been chasing him, see the girl and are distracted as Jakabok runs off. Jakabok then encounters a couple in the grass. Jakabok is forced to kill the hostile male counterpart, taking his clothes. He wanders into a crowd trying to blend in as a peasant, but his inhuman feet give his disguise away. As the crowd approaches to massacre him, a pair of soldiers decide to take him away to be judged by an Archbishop. While being escorted away, one of the men kills the other. After horrendously slaughtering the crowd, the man reveals himself to Jakabok - now referred to as "Mister B." - as a powerful demon known as Quitoon. Quitoon and Mister B. head off, and for the next one hundred years cause a great deal of calamity in the countryside. Eventually, the two find themselves in disagreement of each other, and separate after Quitoon threatens Jakabok. Jakabok takes refuge in the German town of Mainz, where he believes Quitoon has headed to, in order to reconcile his differences. He stumbles across Johannes Gutenberg and his company - including the Archbishop and Quitoon - who claims to possess a secret so powerful that it could rock the foundations of even Heaven and Hell. The secret turns out to be the first printing press, over which a large battle soon erupts between the celestial and the infernal. Gutenberg's wife is revealed to be an angel. Jakabok is wounded and passes out. When he comes to, he discovers the conflict has ended. Jakabok enters a room in which he sees the angels and demons conversing over the secret, where the Archbishop reveals himself to be a demon. They spot Jakabok, and argue over how to keep him silent about the secret. Instead of destroying him, they turn his very essence into words, and embed him onto paper. At this point, Jakabok - after several persuading attempts throughout the story - threatens the reader one final time to burn the book and set him free. After realizing that the reader is heartless and cold, he gives up on asking. He decides to stop telling the story, and instead chooses to wait for another person to open the book and obey his demands to set the book ablaze. After all, he concludes, "words know how to wait." |
My Perfect Life | Dyan Sheldon | null | The story centers on Lola's best friend, Ella. School elections for student body president are being held at Dellwood. Lola wants to run against Carla Santini but can't because she hasn't been class representative for one term. So instead Lola enters Ella and Sam to be candidates and run against Carla. |
Halo: Contact Harvest | null | null | Humanity has spread across the galaxy, and the outer colony "Harvest" is one of the most remote. Although Harvest itself is only one-third the size of Earth, its fertile surface serves as the breadbasket for the other colonies. The United Nations Space Command Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) notices strange disappearances of human ships around Harvest, and assumes that Insurrectionists are attacking the vessels. The ONI pulls Staff Sergeants Avery Johnson and Nolan Byrne from the frontlines of the civil war to raise a militia to protect Harvest. Meanwhile, it is revealed that the disappearances are due to an alien Kig-Yar vessel intercepting the ships in their search for relics left by the Forerunners, an ancient race sacred to the Kig-Yar and other members of the Covenant. Members of the vessel are shocked to discover that their instruments indicates hundreds of thousands of Forerunner relics on the planet of Harvest. A Covenant Unggoy Deacon named Dadab is alarmed when he realizes the Kig-Yar shipmistress intends to steal a portion of the relics for herself, starting with relics leaving the planet on a human cargo ship. The ship is actually a trap set by the humans, with Johnson and Byrne onboard. Johnson and Byrne kill several of the Covenant boarding party when they enter the cargo ship, which is later destroyed by a methane explosion. Dadab and his Huragok friend, Lighter than Some, escape the blast and are picked up by a Covenant ship crewed by Jiralhanae. These agents, led by their chieftain Maccabeus, have been ordered to confirm the presence of the relics; despite the reservations of his nephew, Tartarus, Maccabeus agrees to parley with the humans on Harvest. In the midst of the meeting in Harvest's gardens, the Covenant begin a firefight and the peace talks are shattered. On the Covenant holy city of High Charity, two San 'Shyuum, the Minister of Fortitude and the Vice-Minister of Tranquility, plot to take the place of the three Prophet Hierarchs currently leading the Covenant. They visit the old, supposedly senile Philologist for blessings and advice, seeking a third San 'Shyuum to help them usurp the throne. As Tranquility and Fortitude are meeting with the Philologist, the "Oracle", a Forerunner A.I. named Mendicant Bias, suddenly awakens from eons of dormancy. Mendicant Bias informs the San 'Shyuum that the "Forerunner artifacts" found at Harvest are actually the A.I.'s "makers", living Forerunners—meaning that the humans themselves are the descendants of the Covenant's gods, and that all the Covenant's writings are false. The Minister of Fortitude realizes that the truth must never be revealed, as this revelation would tear the Covenant apart. Instead, Fortitude, Tranquility, and the Philologist plot to quickly take the throne so they can exterminate the "reclaimers". Back on Harvest, Johnson and his squad of militia are heavily out-manned and out-gunned. Maccabeus is ordered to "glass" the planet from space, but disobeys and launches a ground assault in an effort to recover the "relics". The human militia tries to keep the aliens busy while evacuating the civilians from the planet; this requires Johnson and his team to board an orbital platform controlled by Dadab and his troops. Tartarus challenges Maccabeus for control of the Jiralhanae pack, killing his uncle and becoming the next leader. Lighter than Some is killed by Tartarus' troops, and Dadab goes off to kill those he believes are responsible. As his weapon only has one more shot left, Dadab searches for Tartarus, who is fighting Johnson. Dadab destroys Tartarus' shield, and the enraged Brute kills the deacon. Wallace Jenkins, a young militia member that had lost his family in the battle, attempts to finish Tartarus off, but the alien escapes. The human civilians and survivors of Harvest successfully evacuate the planet on hundreds of freighters, while on High Charity, the Minister of Fortitude, Tranquility, and The Philologist become the new Prophet Hierarchs. They take the names Truth, Regret, and Mercy, declaring a new age for the Covenant has begun, and that the humans must be annihilated for their crimes. |
Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith | James H. Billington | 1,980 | The book takes its name from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, and it attempts to investigate the passion for revolutionary change which developed strongly in Central Europe and Russia starting with the French Revolution of 1789. Unlike many other histories of revolutions and revolutionaries Billington does not focus on events and social causes leading to popular uprisings. Instead he follows a sometimes almost invisible thread of incendiary ideas sometimes transferred via occult societies, but all having the common genesis in the motto of the French Revolution: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité". In Billington's historiography he presents the second and third terms as reactions to and expansions of the more rudimentary and susceptible to egoism liberty. He describes how the idea of brotherhood was inherited from secret and occult societies such as the freemasons and became an inflammatory idea which led to the Paris Commune but then was extinguished as far as popular revolutions went (until it resurfaced as national socialism in 1920s' Germany). Instead the idea of egality would become the fuel for socialism and communism. Billington equates the two schools of thought, that both while working toward establishing these mutual goals together, are socially opposed in outside appearance. Both working toward this goal of a secular humanist society that is both egalitarian and utilitarian in their own respective way (one promoting individualism, the other collectivism). These two social power factions being founded by the two thinkers Proudhon and Marx. Proudhon being the social and secularist republican (anti-monarchist) individualist and Marx the socialist anarchist (communism) collectivist. |
Little Green Men: A Novel | Christopher Buckley | 1,999 | John O. Banion is a well-known pundit, who hosts a popular Sunday-morning television show (similar to Meet the Press). One morning, Banion grills the president of the United States on issues surrounding NASA. Shortly after, while enjoying a game of golf, Banion is abducted by what he believes are aliens and taken to their lab and probed. When he is returned, Banion is a changed man. He sets about trying to convince his friends in the Washington elite that the alien threat is real, but he is met with skepticism and derision. His marriage begins to fall apart and his friends abandon him. Banion starts to doubt himself, but is soon abducted a second time. When he returns from this abduction he completely abandons his old life and redevotes all his energy to pressuring Congress and the White House to investigate the alien threat. In fact, Banion was not abducted by aliens at all. Rather, he was abducted by Majestic, a government agency so secret that not even the president knew it existed. The purpose of Majestic was to occasionally make U.S. citizens believe they had been abducted by aliens. The abductees helped spread paranoia that was crucial to sustain public support for NASA's funding levels. When Majestic saw that Banion was critical of these funding levels, a Majestic agent authorized the abduction. However, the abduction of a well-known public figure caused problems within Majestic. Normally, they abducted slightly crazy people because, while helping "spread the word", nobody would take them too seriously. In an attempt to cover up the error, the leader of Majestic attempts to have Banion sentenced to death. As the truth about Majestic is discovered, the agency is ultimately forced to disband and the charges against Banion are dropped, although his life as a "Beltway insider" is ruined. |
Winter of Fire | null | 1,993 | Elsha is a teenager living in a bleak, cold future where world-wide cloud cover has permanently blocked out the sun. Humans have split into two classes - the Chosen and the Quelled, of which Elsha is the latter. The Quelled are doomed to spend their lives in servitude to the Chosen, mining "firestones" - the only means of warmth on the planet. The Firelord is the leader of the Chosen, said to be a great and powerful man. A rebellious girl, Elsha causes trouble for herself - even going so far as being considered for execution - until she is met by a Chosen man named Amasai, Steward of the Firelord, and given the highest position available to a woman - Handmaiden to the Firelord. On her journeys with the Firelord, Elsha meets Teraj, later revealed to be the Firelord's son, with whom Elsha forms a romantic relationship. Elsha uses her unlikely position to fight the stigma and oppression of her people, eventually inheriting the title for herself after the Firelord's unexpected death and changing the course of the planet's history for the better. It is implied Elsha marries Teraj. *Out of Print* |
The White Lioness | Henning Mankell | 1,993 | Apart from a prologue following the formation of the Boer nationalist group Broederbond in 1918, the story takes place in 1992. The plot follows two parallel patterns, one during late apartheid South Africa where incumbent president F.W. de Klerk, leader of the Afrikaner minority which is on the brink of losing power to the African majority under the leadership of the ANC, about to end 44 years of suppression by the Broederbond rule. Simultaneously, detective chief inspector Kurt Wallander is investigating a case of a missing female Methodist real-estate agent outside Ystad. Upon the eventual recovery of her body, as well as the discovery of a black cut-off finger at the crime scene, detective Wallander realizes the case has deep roots in the history and current development in South Africa, where an extremist cell of the Broederbond is about to orchestrate the assassination of Nelson Mandela, wishing to plunge the country into a long and devastating civil war. Mankell, who himself is deeply interested in questions concerning South Africa and its history and who resides in the country part-time, released the book in 1993 during the reign of the National Party and the Afrikaner rule. |
The Man Who Smiled | Henning Mankell | null | After killing a man in the line of duty (in The White Lioness), Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression. He has just decided to leave the police when an old friend, Sten Torstensson, approaches him to secretly investigate the recent death of his father in a car accident. At first Kurt dismisses his friend's suspicions as unlikely, when Sten is found dead, murdered with no doubt, in exactly the same manner as a Norwegian businessman shortly before. Against his previous judgement, Kurt returns to work to investigate what he is convinced is a case of double murder. |
The Fifth Woman | Henning Mankell | null | A sadistic serial killer has been preying on men, beginning with a retired car salesman whose interests appear to be limited to bird watching and poetry and whose body was discovered in a punji stick pit and a flower shop manager, found starved and garrotted in the woods. Wallander soon realises both men have a past record of violence towards women, and after another man is drowned in a lake, he goes on the hunt for an avenging angel... |
One Step Behind | Henning Mankell | null | Two young women and one young man, inexplicably dressed as the nobility of Sweden did during the reign of Gustavus III, are found dead, all slain with a single bullet, their bodies half consumed by animals in the wilderness. Wallander is horrified when he makes a connection between the crime and his close friend Svedberg, and after the latter is found savagely murdered in his own apartment, the tormented detective finds himself up against a deranged, merciless killer who remains just one step ahead of him. |
End Games | Michael Dibdin | 2,007 | Aurelio Zen is posted to remote Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot. And beneath the surface of a tight-knit, traditional community he discovers that violent forces are at work. There has been a brutal murder and Zen is determined to find a way to penetrate the code of silence, to uncover the truth, but his assignment is complicated by another secret which has drawn strangers from the other side of the world - a hunt for ancient buried treasure, launched by a single-minded player with millions to spend pursuing his bizarre and deadly obsession. |
Black Man | Richard Morgan | 2,007 | Carl Marsalis is a genetic variant known as a 'Thirteen', characterized by high aggression and low sociability. Bred to serve in a military capacity, Thirteens were later confined on reservations or exiled to Mars. Carl, having won by lottery the right to return from Mars, works covertly, tracking down renegade Thirteens. The novel follows Carl's attempts to apprehend a Mars escapee and uncover the forces shielding his quarry. |
Not in the Flesh | Ruth Rendell | 2,007 | Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury - a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton shroud. The post mortem can not reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs. Although it covers a relatively short period of time, the police computer stores a long list of missing persons. Men, women and children disappear at an alarming rate, something like 500 every day nationwide. So Wexford knows he is going to have a job on his hands to identify the corpse. And then, only about twenty yards away from the woodland burial site, in the cellar of a disused cottage, another body is found. The detection skills of Wexford, Burden and the other investigating officers of the Kingsmarkham Police Force are tested to the utmost to discover whether the murders are connected and to track down whoever is responsible. |
Dark Fire | Christine Feehan | null | When Darius, the leader of a group of Carpathian musicians, first sees the new mechanic hired to work on the band's touring vehicles, he is astonished to see the red color of her hair. It has been centuries since he last saw colors or even felt emotions. Although the mechanic Tempest Trine needs the job, she quickly realizes that in touring with Darius, she's bitten off more than she can chew. Tempest has always felt different, apart from others. But from the moment his arms close around her, enveloping her in a sorcerer's spell, Darius seems to understand her unique gifts. But does his kiss offer the love and belonging she seeks, or a danger more potent than anything she has ever known? |
The Starship Trap | null | 1,993 | While traveling to an important diplomatic meeting, the USS Enterprise is attacked by a Klingon warship. Managing to secure a truce, Kirk discovers the Klingon captain thought he was gaining revenge for vanishing Klingon ships. Kirk and his crew soon learn that ships from all over known space are vanishing. They race to stop the phenomenon before interstellar war breaks out. |
The Baker's Boy | null | null | The Baker's Boy begins with the rape of Queen Arinalda, the queen of Castle Harvell, by a man called Baralis. During the night, Baralis tastes three bloods (his own, the queen's and his dead servant's, Lusk). At the same time, a wiseman by the name of Bevlin watches a meteorite split into two pieces, one red and one white. The story moves forward twelve years and many important characters are introduced, as well as the prophecy which presides within the whole story. Firstly, King Lesketh is shot by a poisonous arrow, planned by both Maybor and Baralis in order to go to war. Secondly, Jack, a mere baker's boy, is hired as a "blind scribe" for Baralis. Also, Morad's prophecy is first mentioned by Bevlin. Bevlin sends a knight, Tawl on a quest to "Find a needle in a haystack." Tawl's quest is to find a boy who is "twelve-summers old" and "unusual," though Bevlin has nothing else for Tawl to go on. The story moves forward five years. At Castle Harvell, there is a stalemate, caused by Baralis, that has been for the past five years. The king's health has deteriorated, and Jack has begun to learn to read what he has written. He goes to the kitchens to bake loaves but falls asleep. The loaves are burnt and Jack, finding out, passes out, but is later woken up by another assistant and finds that the loaves are just right. He runs away from the castle in fear of Baralis. Melliandra, a daughter of Maybor, is due to marry Prince Kylock for her father's own ambition. She also runs away from the castle thinking that she could get away from the prince. Eventually she and Jack meet up and begin to journey together. Tawl has been caught in Rorn and tortured by the archbishop for one year. He is released and followed as he finds out about a place called Larn. There he receives information on where to find the boy he seeks, yet he must pay a high price for this. |
The Liars | Henry Arthur Jones | 1,897 | Lady Jessica Nepean is fond of flirtation, not so much because she is dissatisfied with her husband, Gilbert, as because it flatters her vanity to keep other men dangling just on the edge of proposal. At the houseparty of her sister, Lady Rosamund Tatton, her flirtation with Edward Falkner, a recently returned South African hero, is the theme of conversation. Everyone insists that Sir Christopher Deering (who had socially stood sponsor for Falkner) must reason him out of his infatuation for Lady Jessica before her husband realizes what she does. The women of the party also attempt to reason with Lady Jessica. Both attempts, however, are foredoomed. Falkner is desperately in love with Lady Jessica, as only a lonely and serious man can be. Lady Jessica is enjoying his ardor immensely, and still believes she can end it with a word. Business calls Gilbert Nepean away, so when the houseparty breaks up Lady Jessica keeps an appointment to have dinner with Falkner at the inn where he is staying. Her husband's brother, George accidentally comes upon her there and, putting the worst possible construction on it, feels himself bound to wire Gilbert to return at once. Lady Jessica happens to see Rosamund and Freddie rowing down the river, and manages to get her sister into the inn. In hopes to forestall George they write Gilbert a letter asking him to call at Lady Rosamund's town house the next morning for an explanation. About the time Gilbert is due, most of the other members of the houseparty turn up at Lady Rosamund's on some pretext or other. When Gilbert arrives, he is met with a most amazing barrage of lies. To complicate the situation, he has already seen a member of the houseparty on his way from the station, and by a chance remark of hers recognizes these subsequent explanations as lies. Finally when Lady Jessica sees that they are hopelessly involved, she bids Falkner tell the truth. By this time she imagines herself as much in love with him as he with her and is ready to run away with him. Sir Christopher, however, is determined that his friend shall not sacrifice his brilliant career for a shallow woman. He manages to reconcile Lady Jessica and her husband by the simple process of blaming Gilbert for the whole affair. "In future," Sir Christopher advises, "flirt with your wife yourself if you don't want some other man to do it." |
Shenzhen | Guy Delisle | null | Delisle had already been to China in Nanjing. He is deployed to Shenzhen as part of an outsourcing project, where he will spend three months in the Great Wall Hotel. Unlike in Hong Kong, there are not many bilingual Chinese so he has language problems during his stay, including with the interpreters at work. Often he has to recourse to drawing or pointing to communicate. Among his experiences of life in Shenzhen include a visit to a Chinese dentist to cure a toothache, but after seeing the unhygienic conditions of the clinic, he is relieved to find out it is just a case of mesialization. Since the main leisure activity in Shenzhen is shopping, Delisle tries to read books, works for L'Association's Lapin magazine, and buys Chinese artbooks (drawings by children, Wang Chi Yun, Hu Buo Zhong). He realizes that the Spirou that he liked as a child is no longer funny. An allegory he applies to the Chinese rural exodus is the Divine Comedy with the Chinese countryside as the Inferno, the USA as the Paradiso and the big Chinese cities, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong as intermediate rings. He finds a copy of Théodore Poussin. His Chinese-speaking acquaintances bring him to try Chinese food. He finds Canton and Hong Kong more interesting than Shenzhen. The only tourist attraction he visits in the new city is the World Windows, since his Chinese friends are not interested in Splendid China. He spends a Christmas dinner with a Chinese animator who, while a fan of Rembrandt has only a black-and-white photo of Bathsheba at Her Bath. There is less political commentary than in his later Pyongyang comic. |
Blood Secret | Kathryn Lasky | 2,004 | Fourteen-year-old Jerry Luna refuses to speak after her mother's disappearance. Living at her great-great-aunt Constanza's house, she discovers a trunk and is transported into the lives of her Jewish ancestors living in Spain in the years before the Spanish Inquisition and in Spanish America. |
The House of the Arrow | A. E. W. Mason | 1,924 | When Boris Waberski, brother-in-law of the wealthy widow Mrs. Harlowe, attempts to talk her English solicitors into advancing him money on his expectations as her heir, he is ignored. Unknown to Waberski, he has been disinherited in favour of Betty Harlowe, the niece of Mrs. Harlowe's late husband. But when Mrs. Harlowe dies suddenly and Waberski accuses Betty of murder, junior partner Jim Frobisher is sent to the estate to find out what's really going on. |
Little Brother | Allan Baillie | null | It follows a young boy, separated from his elder brother whilst attempting to flee the terror of the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It provides an insight into the general plight of refugees using the specific instance of this horrible experience as a backdrop. Muong Vithy is the main character of Little Brother. Vithy has worked for a year in the Big Paddy, with his big brother Mang. Their sister, Sorei, and their mother and father are gone. They run away, trying to escape from the soldiers, the Khmer Rouge. They manage to get away, but not for long. Mang has advice for getting away: "Follow the lines... to the border." Vithy is puzzled about the advice. What lines? Which border? Suddenly they are separated as they run for their life and Vithy is left alone in the forest. The soldiers leave him, no doubt pursuing Mang. Vithy forages for food that night and starts traveling to Cambodia's border. As he is traveling beside the road he sees soldiers - not the Khmer Rouge. He finds himself on the outskirts of the now deserted Phnom Penh, finds a little gold leaf and meets a boy (real name Ang), the King. Vithy stays in the King's City and fixes a motor for him. When they are working for their meals the King hides Vithy in a truck, and gives him the gold leaf as payment for the motor and some water. The truck travels very near Angkor. Vithy jumps off and walks for a few hours. Then, he finds himself face to face with a young boy, though much older than himself, on a bicycle and bribes the boy with the gold leaf The King gives him. The boy says it is too little but lets him build a bicycle in his graveyard of bicycles. Will Vithy make it to the border on his struggle to find his older brother? |
But'n'Ben A-Go-Go | Matthew Fitt | null | Set in the year 2090, the book depicts a future world where global warming has caused sea level to rise considerably. The Highlands of Scotland are the only unsubmerged part of Britain - the Highlands now being known as the Drylands. Damage to the ozone layer has resulted in much higher levels of UV light and so sunburn and skin cancer are serious issues - most people do not venture outside unless entirely necessary, and carry high factor suncream and anti-cancer kits. Most of the world's population were wiped out in "God's flood"; the survivors live in collections of floating oil-platform-like city structures, known as parishes. The story takes place around the seas and drylands that were once Scotland - initially Port, a collection of parishes (named after towns around Scotland) attached to what was once Greenock by underwater cables. The Population of Port are watched constantly by a totalitarian government; there are class divides in the parishes (there is an underclass of Danish refugees living in many of the lower levels); the climate of Earth is now inhospitable. In addition to these problems, Senga, a new strain of HIV infects much of the population. There is no cure, and the entire population is infected with the Mowdy virus (similar to HIV) and are dependent on government issued medication to suppress Senga. Senga also becomes active if individuals engage in sex - reproduction is performed using laboratory techniques, and only virtual sex is possible. Anyone who develops Senga is put into isolation for the virus to run its course - these people are kistit - entombed in capsules in huge hospitals. Victim's thoughts are visualised by thoctscreens on each kist. |
Florence of Arabia | Christopher Buckley | 2,004 | The wife of the ambassador of the fictional Middle Eastern nation of Wasabia gets drunk, steals her husband's car and drives out of the compound. When pulled over by police, she desperately phones her friend Florence Farfaletti, the "Deputy to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs," begging for asylum to avoid a harsh punishment. Florence is unable to arrange asylum. The wife is taken back to Wasabia and beheaded for her crime. In anger over her friend's loss, Florence drafts a proposal to introduce a women's television network in the relatively liberal Matar. The state department rejects the proposal, and reassigns Florence to an obscure posting outside the country. To Florence's surprise, a mysterious government employee, identified only as "Uncle Sam," representing an unknown agency, notifies Florence that her proposal has been accepted and agrees to fund the mission. Florence arrives in Matar and creates a women's television network that is broadcast into neighboring Wasabia. The network airs shows like "One Thousand and One Mornings," which feature empowered female characters who nettle their oppressors and make fun of men. The programming is effective, eventually causing the women of Matar to stage an uprising. Florence is thrown in jail, but ultimately is rescued and returns to the United States. Back in the United States, Florence discovers that her operation was not funded by the U.S. government at all, but rather by the Waldorf Group, a private equity firm which wanted to prevent extremism in Wasabia to help secure the flow of profits. Florence is exasperated to have been working for bankers all along, but glad that her work improved the status of women's rights in Wasabia. An ex-president, who is on the board of the Waldorf Group, tells her, "One way or the other, Florence, we're all working for investment bankers." |
A Cure for a Cuckold | John Webster | null | The house of Woodroff, and English merchant and justice of the peace, is celebrating the wedding of Woodroff's daughter Annabel with her suitor Bonvile. Two of the wedding guests, Lessingham and Clare, open the play in conversation about the wedding. Lessingham, who is in love with Clare, tries to use the occasion to further his own suit; but Clare is withdrawn and taciturn. She leaves him alone, then sends him a curt and cryptic message that reads: ::Prove all thy friends, find out the best and nearest; ::Kill for my sake the friend that loves thee dearest. Lessingham is appalled at this; but his passion for Clare is so intense that he feels compelled to obey Clare's dictates to win her love. When other wedding guests and friends reproach Lessingham for his preoccupation, he confesses that he needs a friend to second him in a duel — a friend who will not only support him morally, but fight and perhaps die with him. Lessingham's professed friends quickly drop away with a variety of excuses, till only one is left: it is Bonvile, the groom. Without hesitation, Bonvile delays his wedding night to accompany Lessingham to the "field of honor" — so proving himself to be the "best and nearest" friend that Lessingham must kill. Since duelling is illegal in England, Lessingham and Bonvile leave immediately for Calais, as was customary at the time. Annabel is distressed to find that her groom has left without a word; she sends a servant after him, and then follows herself. In the nearby woods, Rochfield, a younger son left destitute by the strictures of primogeniture, has decided to turn thief; he encounters Annabel, his first intended victim, and tries to rob her of her wedding necklace and bracelets. These, however, are locked onto her; as he fumbles with them in trying to remove them, Annabel grabs his sword. Yet because he is a gentlemanly thief who does not threaten her virtue, she returns his sword and promises to give him the monetary value of her jewelry, if he returns with her to her house. Since his career as a thief is not promising well, Rochfield agrees. True to her word, Annabel gives Rochfield twenty gold pieces, and introduces him as a friend of the groom. Justice Woodroff is gathering investors for a trading voyage he's planning, and Annabel maneuvers Rochfield into investing his twenty gold pieces in the venture. Broke again and having nothing to lose, Rochfield enlists in the venture personally. The voyage turns out to be brief but eventful: when not long out of port, the ship is attacked by "three Spanish men-of-war." The captain and master are killed — but Rochfield takes command and leads the crew in an effective resistance; they even capture one of the Spanish ships, and return to England with a lucrative prize. From a desperate would-be thief, Rochfield has suddenly become a hero flush with new wealth. On the beach at Calais, Lessingham reveals that Bonvile is his intended opponent. First surprised, then angered, Bonvile dismisses Lessingham's friendship; he suggests that Lessingham may want Annabel for himself, this being his true motive for the duel. This break in their friendship paradoxically negates the premise of the duel. Rather than fighting to the death as friends, the two men return to England separately, as enemies. When Lessingham confronts Clare again, she tells him that he has completely misunderstood her meaning. Clare confesses that she was madly and hopelessly in love with Bonvile; with his marriage, she was deeply despondent. Clare had thought that Lessingham would recognize her, Clare, and his dearest friend, and therefore his correct victim. Once the five passionate young people, Annabel, Bonvile, Clare, Lessingham, and Rochfield, are all under the same roof, they involve themselves in a tangle of misunderstandings and jealousies — until wise old Woodroff manages to get them altogether and straighten them out at the end of the play. In the subplot, a sailor named Compass returns home after four years at sea — to find that his wife Urse, believing him dead, has borne an illegitimate child, a son now a year old. Compass not only forgives her, but wants to be acknowledged as the child's father. In Compass's laissez-faire attitude, the true father has actually done the sailor a service in begetting him a child. This brings Compass into conflict with the boy's biological father, a merchant named Franckford. (Franckford is Woodroff's brother-in-law, and the link between the two plots.) Since Franckford's marriage (with Woodroff's sister Luce) is barren, Urse's baby is his only heir. Franckford has been paying the costs of the child's upkeep, and insists on his parental rights. The two men almost go to law over the issue (allowing for some satire on lawyers in the process), before Justice Woodroff, in a sort of mock-trial in a tavern, rules that the baby does not belong to either of the men, but to Urse, his mother. Compass and Urse renew their vows in the final scene, to make a new start as a family. The easy amorality of the subplot distressed Victorian critics like Swinburne and Gosse. Modern readers may tend to take the opposite approach, and judge the main plot's ethic of chastity, honor, and duelling far less humane and palatable than Compass's live-and-let-live ethos. |
Dark Demon | Christine Feehan | null | Natalya first meets Vikirnoff in a forest while hunting a different vampire, who has help with him. They attempt to kill the vampire, and meet each other, Vikirnoff knowing that Natalya is his life mate. While hunting the "Troll King", the two battle enemies, each other, and make love repeatedly. Between the beautiful sessions of lovemaking, Natalya strives to find out about the compulsion that has brought her to the mountains. With some help from Vikirnoff, they make it to the icy caves where it was rumored Xavier had resided. They try to find a knife to get a book of spells that Soren, Natalya's father, has hidden away. |
Dark Reflections | Samuel R. Delany | 2,007 | Dark Reflections tells the story of Arnold Hawley, a gay, African-American poet who lives most of his life in New York City. The novel is divided into three sections, each illustrating a period in Arnold's life. Where most novels would start in youth and move towards old age, Dark Reflections begins, instead, with Arnold between the ages of 52 and 68, then moves backwards to his middle 30's, and finally recounts his early college days. |
Dark Secret | Christine Feehan | null | Rafael De La Cruz has spent centuries hunting vampires with his brothers, and with each passing year his capacity to feel emotions has grown weaker and weaker until finally there's barely been a memory left-until only sheer willpower keeps him from turning into the very abomination he hunts. But it'll take more than will to keep him away from the woman who is meant to be his and his alone… For five years, rancher Colby Jansen has been the sole protector of her younger half-siblings, and with fierce determination and work she has kept her family together and the ranch operational. Now, the De La Cruz brothers are threatening that stability. They claim that her siblings belong with their father's family, not with her. Colby vows to fight them-especially the cold and arrogant Rafael De La Cruz. But Rafael is after more than her family-he wants Colby and will not let anything stand between them. After ages of loneliness, the raw desire to possess her overwhelms his very soul, driving him to claim her as his life mate,though she has nothing to do with him. When Colby first meets Nicolas De La Cruz, he frightens her but his brother, Rafael De La Cruz, disturbs her. She feels an unknown connection with him. |
Fools Crow | James Welch | 1,986 | The novel takes place in 1870 in the lives of the southern Blackfeet people. The main character, White Man's Dog, joins his friend Fast Horse in a night-time raid against the Crows. In the first few chapters, White Man's Dog is portrayed as weak and powerless compared to the others. Because of that, he visits the medicine man, Mik-Api to get rid of the bad spirits, to become more powerful, and to obtain good medicine to further better himself. Yellow Kidney appoints White Man's Dog to lead the other young warriors in stealing a herd of horses. White Man's Dog is at first a little scared that he has been chosen, but he sings his warrior songs to gain courage. As they drive the horses away from the village, a scout appears. White Man's Dog rushes in and kills the scout before the alarm can be raised. Fast Horse foolishly shouts out and awakens the village and the Crows begin searching for the intruders. As Yellow Kidney attempts to steal the buffalo runners (biggest and fastest horses) he is seen. He does whatever he has to, to stay hidden. Yellow Kidney hides in a lodge where he finds a number of apparently sleeping figures. When he hears his pursuers outside, he hides beneath the robes (sleeping bag) of a young girl. Pressed against her naked and feverish body, he becomes aroused and has strokes her breasts and vagina before having sex with the girl before he realizes that she and her companions are dead of a disease called White Scab. As he tries to escape, Yellow Kidney is shot in the thigh and captured. As punishment for his crime, the Crows cut off his fingers before tying him to a horse and sending him out of the camp into a driving snowstorm. White Man's dog returns to his tribe where he gains respect for his success in the raid. Feeling responsible for Yellow Kidney’s loss because he did not reveal the full contents of a recurrent prophetic dream, he begins to provide Yellow Kidney's family with food and supplies. After some time, Yellow Kidney returns to the camp and tells the story of Fast Horse's foolishness. Shamed by his actions, Fast Horse leaves the tribe and joins Owl Child and his band of renegades in killing the encroaching Napikwans (white people). During the time he was missing, Yellow Kidney's wife, Heavy Shield Woman, makes a vow that should Yellow Kidney return, she will be the Medicine Woman at the Sun Dance. This is an unusual request as "...most bands did not like to have a woman declare herself for this role; if she failed, it would bring dishonor on them and disfavor from Sun Chief himself..." (p 44), and upon Yellow Kidney's return, White Man's Dog is sent to obtain consent from the other bands of Pikunis. After his return, he marries Red Paint, the daughter of Heavy Shield Woman and Yellow Kidney. While at the Sun Dance, White Man's Dog gains his first spirit animal, by releasing Wolverine from a trap. He also partakes in a ceremony in which he cuts his breasts open and implants pegs attached to a medicine pole. He dances around the pole until the ropes snap and he passes out. He does this to purify himself from feeling sexual desire for his father's third wife, Kills Close to the Lake. He has a dream where he finds her along a stream, naked, and they confront each other about their sexual tension. She leaves with him a white stone the size of the finger. He wakes up to find this rock beside him. Towards the end of the ceremony, Kills Close to the Lake tells him she sacrificed her finger to pure herself of the same sexual desires. Red Paint becomes pregnant and they decide to name the child "Sleep Bringer". The name Sleep Bringer derives from a Butterfly which Red Paint saw at the exact moment she was starting to think she was pregnant. White Man's Dog earns his name, Fools Crow, after he goes back to the Crow tribe and is able to scalp their chief, Bull Shield. Rumors spread that he had used his good medicine to confuse the Crows, hence the name Fools Crow. In his second dream, Fools Crow is ordered by the raven to kill a mountain man who has been hunting animals for fun and leaving their bodies to rot. In the culture of Pikunis, this is seen as a heinous act. Fools Crow uses Red Paint as bait, but then Hunter realizes this. Fools Crow knows this, and rushes in trying to kill him, but the Napikwan puts up a tough fight. In the end, Fools Crow is able to kill the foe, but he is injured by a spear wound. However, the scalp that he gets is of a wolf. Fools Crow is slated to take over Dry Bones and learn the Beaver medicine. Yellow Kidney decides to leave the tribe, seeing how distant the whole world seems to him after his injury. While out alone, he decides to go back and name Red Paint's offspring, Yellow Calf. He accepts the facts of what has happened to him and realizes that he is able to do things fast without the use of his fingers. However, before he can go back, he is shot by a Napikwan who had vowed to avenge the farmer, whose family was terrorized by Owl Child's gang. Running Fisher is caught having an affair with his father's third wife, Kills Close to the Lake. Rides-at-the-Door's second wife alerts him of this, and he banishes Running Fisher to another tribe and sends Kills Close to the Lake back to her family. However, he is not strict nor very vengeful. Red Paint's younger brother contracts rabies after being bitten by a rabid wolf. Fools Crow has to cure him, because Mik-Api is away, healing another tribe. Fools Crow has transferred roles from a warrior to a healer. This shows that he has learned to fill whatever role society needs of him. Fast Horse comes upon Yellow Kidney's body and decides to bring it back to the tribe. However, he does not return to Owl Child's gang and decides to go north and live alone. The book ends with Fools Crow visiting the Feather Woman, the wife of Morning Star and mother of Star Boy. Fools Crow watches a "yellow hide" and notices that images are forming within the hide. The yellow hide reveals four different visions to Fools Crow. One is the vision of the destruction of Heavy Runner's camp from the seizers (white soldiers), the second is a vision of Indian children attending a boarding school with their hair cut off, the third is a vision of the spreading of smallpox within his camp and the number of dead bodies stacked on a platform, and the last is a vision of lifeless land all around the region, not one animal can be found in the vision. Feather Woman tells Fools Crow to prepare the Pikunis for what is to come and to pass on the traditions of the Pikunis. She tells him that he would do much good for the Pikunis and that he will pass on the stories. Fools Crow returns to his tribe, and is unable to prevent the disaster he foresaw. Fools Crow meets Native Americans being forced to migrate north and accepts the fact that the Napikwans are swarming over the land. They must change their way of living, including changing their diet to fish. The book concludes with Welch detailing the culture of the Pikunis represented by the animals, showing that although their lifestyles were changed, their culture still lives on. |
The Bomb | null | null | Sorry Rinamu is a 16-year old boy who lives on Bikini Atoll. In the first section of the book, Sorry and the natives live through World War II under constant threat by the Japanese soldiers occupying the island. However, one day, American forces attack the island, defeating the Japanese soldiers, and freeing the island. Later, World War II ends. However, an American battleship lands in the lagoon, and a few days later, an American commander, one of which represents Operation Crossroads, delivers the news to the natives that Bikini has been chosen as a site for nuclear tests due to "ideal" conditions, and asks the villagers to move. Most agree, but Abram, Sorry's uncle, insists that the villagers should not submit so easily to white men, yet they still do. The villagers vote to move away from the island. The American tells the natives that the atoll will be returned in a few years, but Abram and Sorry believe that he is lying. As scientists arrive on the atoll, it is being converted to a temporary military base. Abram comes up with a plan to stop the nuclear tests by sailing into the test area with a red canoe, but he dies of a heart attack before he could carry out the plan. When Sorry decides that he should do it, the natives believe that he is insane, yet he is accompanied by Tara Malolo, a local teacher, and his maternal grandfather, Jonjen. They carry out their plan, but the bombers fail to notice the canoe, and/or the light glinting of the tin they brought with them and they are killed by the blast. The natives return in 1969 and stay for ten years, but doctors notice a radioactive element left over by the blast, Cesium 137, and the natives leave the island again. pt:A Bomba (livro) |
Forest of the Pygmies | Isabel Allende | 2,004 | The story opens with the main characters Nadia Santos and Alexander Cold being on safari in Kenya and accompanying Alex's grandmother Kate, who works as a reporter for the magazine International Geographic. At a certain point in their stopover, they visit a market where a seer tells them to stay close to each other if they want to avoid danger. Soon afterwards, the team is joined by a Roman Catholic missionary who introduces himself as Brother Fernando. The clergyman asks the crew to fly him to Ngoubé, a village situated deep inside the African jungle. Two of his friars, who had previously moved into the village to look after the heavily disadvantaged population, have recently sent him a letter telling him about the villagers' disastrous conditions and their constantly worsening situation. Their deteriorating state is due to the two rulers of the village, who, alongside the mysterious and powerful sorcerer Sombe, cruelly torment the villagers and are not fond at all of the friars' presence. Despite some arguments arising between Brother Fernando and the seductive African pilot Angie Ninderera, Kate and the others agree to come along with the priest and help him find the friars. Angie reluctantly agrees to fly the crew to the village's whereabouts. Upon landing, Angie's plane gets broken by crashing onto a small beach, therefore isolating them from the outside world. Several days later, the crew is found by some fishermen who grudgingly guide them to the entrance of a forest which, according to them, belongs to a very dangerous and tyrannical king called Kosongo. He brutally usurped the command of Ngoubé some time earlier - causing the former queen Nana-Asanta to disappear - and terrorizes its population, availing himself of his two assistants, a mysterious sorcerer called Sombe and the commandant Maurice Mbembelé, with both of them being notorious for their cruelty and cold-bloodedness. Once the crew has arrived in the village and been taken to Kosonge, they masquerade as reporters who want to interview Kosongo about his allegedly world-renowned wisdom and supernatural skills. Kosongo finally orders the crew to spend the rest of the day in an unfurnished hut surrounded by soldiers watching them. Over the course of the following nights, Nadia explorates the village on her own and discovers that the villagers' wives are forced to spend the nights imprisoned in a couple of barracks. After some difficulties in terms of communication and understanding, she manages to gain the women's support, who too suffer from the horrible tyranny, having been separated from their husbands and sons. The commandant Mbembelé actually forces those ones to become brainwashed soldiers and obliges them to spy on their own families. Alex and Nadia eventually escape into the forest to search for the pygmies and convince them of rebelling against Kosongo and Mbembelé. They furthermore come across the village's former queen Nana-Asante, who agrees to support them as well. The pygmies eventually leave the wood and turn up in the village. One of their leaders challenges Mbembelé to a duel. Thanks to his agility and rapidity he finally exhausts the commandant, who is subsequently chased away by Alexander himself in the shape of a giant black jaguar. Shortly after Mbembelé's getaway, the terrifying sorcerer Sombe shows up in the village, his terrifying appearance smashing the villagers' resistance at once. Nadia, who has meanwhile stayed in the forest, arrives in the village in the shape of a white eagle, accompanied by Nana-Asante and many other people equipped with magical powers whom Nadia and Alex had met during their former journeys, each of them being narrated in the two previous volumes of Allende's trilogy. At the end of the battle, when Sombe has to face his imminent failure, Angie rips his mask off, and Mbembelé, Sombe and Kosongo turn out to be the same person. The man is thrown into a waterhole full of crocodiles. Brother Fernando decides to stay in the village and help the population restore their existence. Angie Ninderera succeeds in contacting a friend of hers, who promises to pick up the crew by means of a helicopter. The epilogue is set two years after Alex's and Nadia's adventure in the African jungle. Alex has graduated from school and begun to study medicine at Berkeley. He has finally managed to persuade Nadia into attending university in the United States. Alex has just flown to New York City, where Kate and Nadia share an apartment. Alex wants to take Nadia to a graduation ceremony. Kate has written three books about their adventures which she now shows to her grandson. |
Blast Off at Woomera | Hugh Walters | 1,957 | Strange objects have been sighted on the moon near Mons Pico and suspecting a communist plot the British Government hurriedly plans a mission to photograph the domes from above closer range. The rocket is not large enough to send a man - enter Chris Godfrey, a 17-year old science whizz with an interest in rocketry and crucially less than 5 feet tall ! The launch site is Woomera Rocket Research Station in South Australia but there may be a Soviet traitor amongst the ground crew... The book pre-dates the first actual usage of satellite imagery by two years, and manned spaceflight by four years. |
Death Star | Michael Reaves | null | The Death Star is an enormous space station capable of destroying an entire planet, constructed under the orders of the ruler of the then new Empire, Emperor Palpatine. Aware of the possibility of rebellion, Palpatine knew that the Death Star would instill fear throughout the galaxy, as well as give him an invaluable weapon in destroying his enemies. The architect of the project was Wilhuff Tarkin. The novel depicts the many politics and hidden agendas behind the massive project, from its construction up until its final destruction. |
The Domes of Pico | Hugh Walters | 1,958 | To the lunar domes previously photographed in Blast Off at Woomera and situated near Mons Pico has been added a cone emitting powerful neutron radiation which is causing havoc to the Earth's nuclear power stations. The diminutive Chris Godfrey has the job of piloting a British rocket to plant a homing beacon next to the cone to enable a strike by American rockets carrying Soviet nuclear warheads... |
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz | F. Scott Fitzgerald | null | John T. Unger, a teenager from the Mississippi River town of Hades, is sent to a private boarding school near Boston. During the summer he visits the homes of his classmates, the majority of whom are from wealthy families. In the middle of his sophomore year, a young man named Percy Washington is placed in Unger's dorm. He rarely speaks, and when he does, it is only to Unger. Percy invites Unger to his home for the summer, the location of which he only states as being "in the West". Unger accepts. During the train ride Percy boasts that his father is "by far the richest man in the world", and, when challenged by Unger, boasts that his father "has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel." Unger later learns that he is in Montana, in the "only five square miles of land in the country that's never been surveyed," and Percy's boasts turn out to be true. Percy's ancestry traces back to both George Washington and Lord Baltimore. His grandfather, Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, decided to leave Virginia and head west with his slaves to enter the sheep and cattle ranching business. However, on his claim he discovered not only a diamond mine, but a mountain consisting of one solid diamond. Washington immediately finds himself in a quandary; the value of diamonds multiplied by the sheer number available for him to mine would make him the richest man ever to live, but, based on the economic law of supply, the sheer number of diamonds, if ever discovered by outsiders, would drive their value to near zero, thus making him a pauper. He immediately hatches a plan, whereby his brother reads to the African-American slaves a fabricated proclamation by General Nathan Bedford Forrest that the South had defeated the North in the American Civil War, thus keeping them in perpetual slavery. Washington travels the world selling only a few diamonds at a time, in order to avoid flooding the market, but enough to give him enormous wealth. The Washington family goes to appalling lengths in order to keep their diamond a secret. Airmen who stray into the area are shot down, captured, and kept in a dungeon. People who visit are killed and their parents told that they have succumbed to an illness while staying there. John falls in love with Percy's sister, Kismine, who accidentally lets slip that he too will be killed before he's allowed to leave. That night, aeroplanes launch an attack on the property, being told by an escaped Italian language teacher. Percy's father offers a bribe to God, "the greatest diamond in the world", but God refuses. John, Kismine, and Jasmine, another sister, escape while Percy and his mother and father choose to blow up the mountain rather than leave it in the hands of others. Penniless, the three survivors are left to ponder their fate. |
Baby Is Three | Theodore Sturgeon | 1,950 | The story describes the creation and "bleshing" of a new life form, Homo Gestalt, on Earth. It is formed by the symbiosis of four or more humans with paranormal abilities. One person, the "head" of the organism, assembles and directs the various parts through telepathy, another is the "hands" of the organism, able to move and change physical objects by telekinesis, the third and fourth persons are twins able to teleport at will, and the fifth person of the organism is a silent Down Syndrome baby with a brain like a computer and who acts as the "brain". "Bleshing" is how the organism describes its own completeness and functionality. The plot follows the psychiatric evaluation of a fifteen-year-old boy named Gerry, who believes he has murdered his caregiver Miss Kew for endangering the "bleshing" of his new organism. fr:Cristal qui songe |
The Free Lunch | Spider Robinson | null | Twelve-year-old Mike is looking for a safe place to escape from the real world. Like Peter Pan, he seeks a fantastic sanctuary where he can stay without worry. Tomas Immega's amusement park, Dreamland, provides a completely immersive theme park experience, and seems to be just what Mike is looking for. Soon after escaping the guest tracking system, Mike meets Annie, a midget known as the Mother Elf, who has eked out a living in Dreamland for thirteen years caring for the park. Annie takes Mike in, but all is not well in Dreamland... The story is full of references to other works: * "Strawberry Fields Forever" * Callahan's Crosstime Saloon * Have Space Suit—Will Travel |
Operation Columbus | Hugh Walters | 1,959 | Both America and Russia plan manned missions to the Moon to examine the wreckage of the structures destroyed in The Domes of Pico. The American astronaut, Morrison Kant, breaks his leg shortly before takeoff, so Chris Godfrey steps in. Both spacecraft arrive at the same time. Unlike Chris Godfrey, the Russian pilot, Serge Smyslov, is unable to leave his Lunar Rover vehicle and both head for the wrecked domes, leading to a tense standoff... The book predates the first use of a Lunar Rover by 11 years. |
The Monkey's Raincoat | Robert Crais | 1,987 | Cole is hired by Ellen Lang to find her missing husband and son and in the end, with Cole and Pike's help, she kills former matador and crime boss Domingo Garcia Duran, the man responsible for her husband's death and her son's kidnapping. The facts behind the events leading to Ellen's husband's involvement with Duran and his death are revealed and her son Perry is restored to her. |
Moon Base One | Hugh Walters | 1,960 | Thousands of young people are terminally ill as a result of the radiation produced by the lunar structures destroyed in The Domes of Pico. In an attempt to determine whether the fall-out from the domes can have a curative effect on the disease a joint East-West mission is planned under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations EXploration Agency (UNEXA). The mission is commanded by Chris Godfrey, accompanied by American, Morrison 'Morrey' Kant and Russian Serge Smyslov. The 'patient' will be Tony Hale, from Aston near Birmingham (who goes on to feature in the rest of the series). The mission starts well, but is soon in trouble when a supply rocket crashes... |
Scales of the Serpent | Richard A. Knaak | 2,007 | This book begins with the attack on the Temple of the Triune by Uldyssian and his followers in the city of Toraja. After destroying the Temple and converting much of the cities populace to his cause, Lilith makes her presence known to Uldyssian, who leaves to confront her. He defeats the demon Gulag at this point by tearing him in two. Astroga (the spider demon) also seeks to attack Uldyssian here, but Lilith sends him away and seals her confrontation with Uldyssian from his sight. A brief fight occurs, during which Lilith reveals that she wants Uldyssian to destroy the Triune and the Temple. While this is happening, the rest of Uldyssian's followers including Mendeln and Serenthia continue to attack the temple, slowed by the statues of Mefis (Mephisto: Lord of Hatred), Dialon (Diablo: Lord of Terror) and Bala (Baal: Lord of destruction) coming to life and attacking them. Rathma communicates with the dragon Trag’oul, revealing he is the Son of Lilith and Inarius, and decides to take a more active role in things despite the fact that it would mean revealing his survival to both his parents. When Uldyssian returns to his followers, he displays astonishing power by keeping the entire temple from collapsing until his followers can escape. He warns the Council Senior of Toraja that he will attack again should the Temple of the Triune grow again in the city. Inarius decides that his power is such that he can now fly again without fear of the Angiris Council discovering Sanctuary, and does so. While he is contemplating Sanctuary's future, he is struck by a familiar sense and realises that his son Rathma is still alive. He doesn't care though, knowing he wouldn't hesitate to treat him any differently than Lilith. While Uldyssian is camping outside Toraja, some of its people come to see him, hoping to learn of the gift. During this time, some Peace Warder's under the disguise of common folk attack Uldyssian. One of the attackers was outside, and is found slain by an arrow shortly afterwards. This is later revealed to be a reanimated Achilios, brought back by Rathma. After speaking to the cities new converts to ensure they understand, they come up with a new name for Uldyssian's followers, "Edyrem", meaning "those who have seen". Serenthia goes to a stream alone to obtain more water for her flask, and unknown to Uldyssian encounters Lilith, who takes possession of her. Astroga has begun to suspect that Lucion is not who he seems to be, and after speaking to his master, Diablo, decides to put his own plan into action. On the journey to Hashir, a malevolent force begins to target Serenthia, but Uldyssian and Mendeln manage to draw its attention away from her by using their power to attack the structure they sense it emanates from. Mendeln meets with Achilios, and decides to tell Uldyssian that he is back. Rathma appears at this point and takes him to Trag’oul, preventing Uldyssian and Serenthia (Lilith) from detecting him, even though they combine their powers in a way they haven’t previously. When they continue their journey they are interrupted by heavy storms, which Serenthia disperses. Astroga takes on the form of the Primus, and has his high priest Arihan attack Uldyssian’s group when they reach Hashir, believing that taking Serenthia as a hostage will allow him to capture Uldyssian. Trag’oul and Rathma explain to Mendeln the history of Sanctuary, that mankind is the offspring of Lilith and Inarius (Rathma being their son). Trag’oul says that when Demons and Angels discover a potential advantage, such as the Nephalem, they fight over it relentlessly, usually resulting in its total destruction. They ask Mendeln to stand with them. Two morlu abduct Serenthia while Uldyssian is talking to the citizens of Hashir, but she quickly reappears and reveals their presence to everyone. When Uldyssian is telepathically attacked by Arihan from the temple, Mendeln appears and takes him to Trag’oul. Arihan, frustrated with the plans failure leaves the morlu and the peace wardens to their fate, returning to the Primus. Needing a scapegoat, Astroga murders Arihan and brings his head to Diablo. Uldyssian grows angry with Rathma and Trag’oul, believing they are corrupting Mendeln, and uses his power to escape. He ends up on mount Arreat, where Rathma appears and takes him to the World Stone. There, Uldyssian tries to use it to give his followers more power, but ends up altering its structure, something Rathma believed was impossible. Upon returning to Trag’oul, they discover that Inarius is active, heading for the world stone. The return Uldyssian to the Jungle to confront Lilith, and they go to mount Arreat to confront Inarius. Inarius overcomes them both easily, and inspects the world stone. Upon discovering the change in its structure, he states that Uldyssian may have condemned them all, hinting that he will decide to destroy Sanctuary and start over. Lilith has seduced Romus, and corrupts him into blindly following her and betraying Uldyssian to her. She kills Romus and attempts to sacrifice Uldyssian and her other corrupted followers to take control of the Edyrem. She fails thanks to Achilios intervening with the spell and freeing Serenthia from her. When Lilith retreats to the temple she finds traces of Astroga in the Primus’s chamber, and realises he had been masquerading as the Primus as well. Astroga confronts her, and they briefly fight. Astroga being the less powerful retreats and decides to form his own followers (this story is described in Moon of the Spider). Lilith decides enough is enough and gathers a huge army, intending to attack the Edyrem from behind and from the main temple. Uldyssian tries to remove Lilith’s taint from her corrupted followers, but is forced to kill them all when the evil within them starts to grow, he vows to make Lilith pay for what she’s done. Achilios decides to speak to Serenthia, but is abducted by an Angel. Rathma and Trag’oul can see no reason for Inarius to do this, and believe another Angel has taken him. They teach Mendeln how to summon spirits, and he summons the dead high priest Malic, offering him revenge against Lilith for information on the main temple. Lilith’s army attacks and she reveals the Thonos, a tentacle creature that attacks from the ground. They are almost overcome until Achilios is sent back to them with arrows that explode on impact. Lilith casts a spell that has the dead from both sides rise and attack the Edyrem, but Mendeln returns and destroys them. Uldyssian accidentally summons Lilith to him, who teleports him into the main temple. Uldyssian defeats Lilith and brings down the temple, leaving her for dead. Rathma enters the temple and finds Lilith dead, not realising it is an illusion Inarius has cast. After he leaves, Inarius enters and confronts a badly injured Lilith, revealing that he has been boosting the power of the Edyrem so they could defeat her. He traps Lilith in a glowing ball and shrinks it down to nothing. He states that her fate is fortunate, compared to what awaits Uldyssian and his followers who in their arrogance, believe themselves to be more than they are. The story continues in third and final installment of the trilogy, The Veiled Prophet. |
Expedition Venus | Hugh Walters | 1,962 | An unmanned probe returning from Venus crashes in the African desert; a Venusian spore on board thrives in its new environment; a grey mould quickly spreading and killing all it touches. An urgent manned mission to Venus is launched from Lunaville, the now permanent Moon base. Chris Godfrey, Morrey Kant, Serge Smyslov, Tony Hale and Pierre a scientist are sent to try and discover what limits the mould's growth in its natural environment. The plan is to collect samples from the Venusian atmosphere but in the end a forced landing is required... |
Love and War | Margaret Weis | null | The book is a compilation of 10 short stories from various authors taking place in the fictional world of Krynn: 1. "A Good Knight's Tale" by Harold Bakst. Told by a Knight of Solamnia, this is a tale that of a selfish father, Aron, who is overprotective over his daughter, Petal, which ultimately leads to a broken heart. 2. "A Painter's Vision" by Barbara Siegel and Scott Siegel. When a passionate artist Seron dies in an accidental fire, his widow Kyra, finds the strength to carry on his memory through a painting. Kyra carries on a strange relationship with a dragon named Tosch, who had befriended her husband before he died. 3. "Hunting Destiny" by Nick O'Donohoe. This is the tale of the undead who haunt Darken Wood, in another of Donohoe's interpretation of an event that took place in the novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. 4. "Hide and Go Seek" by Nancy Varian Berberick. Starts with a captive boy named Keli who is captured by a man named Tigo and a goblin named Staag. No sooner is Tasslehoff Burrfoot captured. They are later rescued by The Companions. 5. "By the Measure" by Richard A. Knaak. 6. "The Exiles" by Paul B. Thompson and Tonya C. Cook. It is the story of Sturm Brightblade's childhood as he and his mother are captured by a ship with guards from an island called Kernaffi. 7. "Heart of Goldmoon" by Laura Hickman and Kate Novak. 8. "Raistlin's Daughter" by Margaret Weis and Dezra Despain. The mysterious tale of the legend of a daughter fathered by the mage, Raistlin Majere. This tale is also reprinted in the novel, The Second Generation. 9. "Silver and Steel" by Kevin Randle. 10. "From the Yearning for War and the War's Ending" by Michael Williams. |
Mararía | null | null | The novel talks about a traveller - we don’t know much about him - who goes to the village of Femés in Lanzarote; there he’s interested about an old woman, who walks in the shadows at night. She is María, who everybody calls Mararía. Woman, lover or witch, but a myth over all. His interest is fed by the stories that he can listen to the people who live in the village, in which everyone fell in her net in the past.Whenever she loved someone, their relationship ended badly, and everybody in the village thinks she is guilty for their suffering. Now she is an old woman who walks in the dark and endures barking dogs and people’s comments. She is a symbol of purification and self-destruction. |
Exit Ghost | Philip Roth | 2,007 | The plot centers on Zuckerman's return home to New York after eleven years in New England. The purpose of Zuckerman's journey, which he takes the week before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, is for him to undergo a medical procedure that might cure or reduce his incontinence. While in New York, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, whom he had last encountered during a visit to the writer E.I. Lonoff's house in December, 1956, as depicted in Roth's novel The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman also agrees to a housing swap with a young writing couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and quickly becomes attracted to Logan. In his hotel room at night, Zuckerman writes a play, He and She, composed of imagined conversations between him and Logan. Through Davidoff and Logan, Zuckerman meets Richard Kliman, a young, brash Harvard graduate who is working on a biography of Lonoff. Kliman was Logan's boyfriend in college. Because of Kliman's zealous interest in a potentially scandalous secret from Lonoff's adolescence, neither Zuckerman nor Bellette wants to help him complete his project. Zuckerman may also be motivated by his own confused feelings about Logan and Kliman. Although critics once considered that Lonoff, deceased and neglected, was modelled partly on the writer Bernard Malamud, he now seems to be based on a number of writers. Henry Roth is a major influence, as becomes clear in Exit Ghost. Roth's biographer is Steven G. Kellman. It is known that Philip Roth has read the later novels of Henry Roth, though some of these remain unpublished. The rationale for Henry Roth is that in his novels published after his death he reveals that he had an incestuous affair with his sister when he was young; it also known that Henry Roth suffered from writer's block for much of his career after publishing Call It Sleep, his only major novel. In Exit Ghost it is revealed that Lonoff also had an incestuous affair with his sister — which led to his writer's block — and the fact that while content to teach in oblivion, he never published again. American politics forms a backdrop to the novel. Zuckerman, Davidoff and Logan watch the results of the 2004 presidential election together. Logan, whose father always voted Republican, was enraged and devastated by the results. The older Zuckerman, though not pleased, was more philosophical and was able to place the results into a more historical context. |
Diary of a Wimpy Kid | Jeff Kinney | 2,007 | As Greg Heffley is getting ready for middle school, he is teased by his older brother Rodrick Heffley because his mom, Susan Heffley, bought him supplies for school, including a blank red diary,instead of his mom buying him a journal like he asked her to. He has a little brother, Manny who is "spoiled rotten" because he gets everything he wants and also gets away with everything he does wrong, unlike Greg, who gets in trouble for everything he does wrong. His father Frank Heffley does not encourage Greg's way of life - playing video games all day - rather than going outside and playing sports. Greg, during the first day of school, is immediately rejected and is forced to sit with another outcast who lives near Greg, Fregley, from whom Greg tries to keep "a safe distance". He is initially unsure of Rowley Jefferson being able to fit in, and tries to change Rowley, who Greg considers immature. Greg and Rowley decide to participate in wrestling at school, although Greg quits after losing a match against Fregley. On Halloween, Greg and Rowley go trick-or-treating, but are challenged by there of teens who they irritate and enrage and spray them with a fire extinger. The two friends barely escape to safety so they decide to go and stay in Gregs grandmother's house until the teens leave them alone. After getting few presents for Christmas, Greg decides to play a game with Rowley in which Rowley must ride a Big Wheel while Greg tries to knock him off. On one of Greg's tries, the ball gets under the front wheel, which causes Rowley to fall off and break his arm. The next day, a bunch of girls crowd around Rowley so they could feed him. Greg and Rowley decide to enroll in the Safety program in which they walk younger kids to their homes. One day, as Greg is walking the kids by himself,he chases the young children, only after scaring them with a stick with worms on it. A neighbor contacts the school and tells them about Greg's unusual behavior. The principal suspects Rowley, as Greg was wearing Rowley's coat. Rowley is quickly fired. Greg initially wants to tell him it is his fault that he was fired, but doesn't, only to let the truth slip later. This leads to Rowley breaking off his friendship with Greg. Greg tries to befriend Fregley to make Rowley jealous, although he is uncomfortable around Fregley. Resorting to auditioning for the school play (based on The Wizard of Oz) Greg lands the role as a tree, while Patty is cast as Dorothy, the protagonist of the novel. During the show's opening performance, Rodrick unexpectedly brings a camera to film the play. Greg becomes too nervous to sing, confusing the other "trees" who also fail to sing. Patty gets frustrated and angers Greg, who then throws props at Patty, and then everyone gets in the fight, ending the play in chaos. Rowley confronts Greg, which leads to a non-physical fight. The teens return and the younger kids scatter. The teens force Greg and Rowley to eat the "Cheese Touch," a moldy piece of cheese that had been left on the grounds of the school. Greg refuses, dishonestly claiming that he is allergic to cheese and will die if he eats it, thus leaving Rowley to eat it. The other students notice that the Cheese is gone, assuming that someone has destroyed it; however, Greg takes the blame instead of Rowley as he feels pity on him. He and Rowley again become friends and Greg begins to anticipate a relaxing summer of playing video games. |
Destination Mars | Hugh Walters | 1,963 | The first man to pass close to Mars is driven insane by strange 'voices' he hears on his radio. He is unable to record the voices as the Van Allen radiation belts wipe the magnetic tapes clean, so doubt is cast on his account. U.N.E.X.A. (United Nations Exploration Agency) send their crack team (Chris Godfrey, Serge Smyslov, Morrey Kant and Tony Hale) to investigate. After landing on the planet's surface they find traces of an ancient civilisation, but then a disembodied Martian appears and demands its people be transported to Earth, where they will enslave the human race. One-by-one the crew are taken over. This novel introduces the concept of the Ion drive, allowing continuous acceleration of one-fifth g. |
The Excalibur Alternative | David Weber | 2,002 | The story begins when a 14th-century English army is abducted by aliens of the Galactic Federation to serve as mercenaries on planets where only low-tech weaponry is legal. The aliens are bound by a Galactic Federation law that states that advanced weapons can not be used on primitive worlds. Another Guild had previously abducted a legion from the Roman Empire and used it to obtain victory in many confrontations and therefore increase its commercial empire. Therefore other aliens were inspired to try the same tactics and came to Earth to find their own army to fight for them. As the plot progresses, the English army continues to fight for the aliens, until the Baron in charge of the English is approached by a dragon-like alien under the heel of the Guild Aliens. The dragon-like creature tells the Baron the story of the Federation. The Galactic Federation was originally started over one hundred fifty thousand years ago by 3 races, with membership of the council requiring development of a form of faster-than-light (FTL) drive. Over the course of their long history, the Federation strayed from its values. It now has 22 races on the council (of which only 1 is an original founder) and when it discovers new races it invades them so it can freeze their technological development and force them to become a protectorate. The dragon-like creature is from one of these worlds, saying that the Federation came during his world's nuclear age. The creature says that all the other races are different than humanity because of the rate at which it develops. This is shown when the Guild Alien makes a comment about how humanity would have developed gunpowder in 1000 years from the time he took the English from the 14th century, instead of the 200 years it actually took. The dragon-creature and the Baron eventually succeed in a mutiny and take over the ship, but they decide that they can not go back to Earth because the Federation would find them too fast. The story then moves forward to the 22nd century, on Earth, now under the single Solar government, where humanity has become capable of building vast ships in space and has developed an FTL drive. However the Federation considers their fast development a threat to its stability and has dispatched a fleet to wipe humanity from the universe. As the massive Federation battleships are about to destroy the comparably tiny human ships, even bigger spaceships appear and destroy the Federation ships easily. The rescuers of Earth are the Avalon Empire, the civilisation founded by the English who have grown in numbers and, using the technology found on the captured Guild ship, have advanced far beyond the Federation. For centuries they have prepared and lay in hiding so could return at the moment of Earth's greatest need (just like the sword Excalibur in the legend of King Arthur, which gives rise to the title of the book). The English reveal themselves to Earth and offer an alliance to take on the Federation, but the fight will be far from easy. The Federation has over fifteen hundred worlds, with an average population of 11 billion on each world, while humanity only has the Avalon empire, who has grown to live across 20 some worlds, and Earth. But with the technical superiority of the Avalon empire and a carefully planned series of rebellions on 'protected' worlds in the Federation humanity at least stands a chance. |
Cirie | Mildred Savage | 2,002 | In this sweeping historical novel of the Russian Revolution, Cirie, clever and beautiful, uses her cool wits and sensuous charm first to make her way among the high nobility of the Romanov world, and then to survive and escape the Revolution that utterly destroys her world. Later in New York during the Great Depression, she is sustained by the survival skills she forged as imperial Russia fell apart. A huge novel of love and deception, chaos and perseverance, in the most shattering upheaval the world has ever known, Cirie is the story of a true 20th century heroine and the times that produced her. |
Birthright | Richard A. Knaak | 2,006 | Birthright takes place before the games Diablo and Diablo II take place. It tells the story of Uldyssian ul-Diomed, a farmer whose only remaining family is his brother, Mendeln. Initially the story starts out with some background information. Uldyssian's family falls victims to a plague, which only he and his brother survive. Not too far into the novel, a terrible murder is unearthed in the woods near his home village, Seram. In this time he has already become infatuated with a stranger to the town named Lylia, and he has started to possess eerie powers, like a thunderstorm that left many dead, including the men of the Cathedral of Light who accused him of the murder and were there to arrest him. Uldyssian and Lylia, along with Uldyssian's brother Mendeln, a woman from their village named Serenthia, and a skilled hunter named Achilios, escape under cover of the storm for the nearby forests. Once there, Lylia explains to Uldyssian that his power is a gift and he accepts this, and comes to awaken the same power in Serenthia and Achilios. Not long after their escape, they are set upon by Peace Warders and a priest from the Temple of the Triune, which stands in opposition to the Cathedral of Light, but Uldyssian easily routs them with the help of Lylia and they continue on to her desired destination. Meanwhile, the priest of the Triune who led the attack against Uldyssian--Malic--returns to the Primus of the Triune, Lucion, who tortures him for his failure. The torture ends with Lucion's gifting Malic with a demonic arm and several vicious morlu to aid his second chance at capturing Uldyssian and bringing him back to the main Temple. |
Doctor Dolittle's Circus | Hugh Lofting | 1,924 | The doctor needs money to pay off a voyage to Africa, so he joins the circus with the pushmi-pullyu as his attraction. He enlightens a circus owner who cares little for animals, fights against the practice of fox hunting and helps other creatures such as a circus seal and cart horses too old to work. |
Doctor Dolittle's Caravan | Hugh Lofting | 1,924 | Pippinella is special in that she possesses what is generally assumed to be an exclusive trait of male canaries: birdsong. Ultimately, Doctor Dolittle creates a "Canary Opera" (using canaries and other bird species as well), based on Pippinella's life story. This opera, jointly composed by both the Doctor and Pippinella, becomes an overwhelming success in London. The novel disrupts the chronological order of the series, with events occurring between Doctor Dolittle's Circus and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle despite the book's publication between Doctor Dolittle's Zoo and Doctor Dolittle's Garden. This book is the follow-up to Doctor Dolittle's Circus, for the Doctor (at this point in time) is still operating the circus he inherited from the runaway former owner, Albert Blossom. Pippinella's eventual fate, and Doctor Dolittle's final adventures with her, are ultimately revealed in the much later book, Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary. |
Story for a Black Night | null | null | A 40-year-old man tells a story of his childhood, when he was ten, living with his sister, mother and grandmother. When strangers left a baby with smallpox at the house, the family is affected by the disease. |
Superstars | Ann Scott | 2,000 | This novel, set in Paris, portrays the economically bleak and emotionally taut lives of three roommates craving for artistic recognition and fame. Evolving in the trends of glamorous parties, borderline sex and designer drugs, Louise, the main character, just turned thirty, is facing an identity crisis. Now working as a techno deejay and a producer, she used to be a bass player for rock bands. Entering the world of electronic music and raves, she also became bisexual. Now she's wondering where this is all leading her. |
Terror by Satellite | Hugh Walters | 1,964 | Tony Hale, skilled engineer and amateur radio ham, smuggles a home-made transceiver on board an Earth-orbiting satellite during his tour of duty. This proves invaluable as the commander of the satellite, Hendriks, is a megalomaniac and demands to be made 'Dictator of the World'. To back up this demand, he begins destroying swathes of the Earth's surface using a radiation beam. The only secure link between the Earth and the satellite is Tony's radio. |
Journey to Jupiter | Hugh Walters | 1,965 | The first manned expedition to Jupiter reaches speeds never experienced before; despite this it takes several months to reach its objective, leading to tensions among the crew, as well as serious vision problems caused by "light slip" A miscalculation in the gravity of Jupiter means that they will not be able to stop in time and will crash into the giant planet. A diversion to the jagged Io offers their only chance of survival. |
A Christian Turn'd Turk | Robert Daborne | null | In the play, that Ward converts to Islam in order to marry Voada, a beautiful Turkish woman with whom he has fallen in love. Ward's conversion to Islam (portrayed in dumbshow) is contrasted with the repentance and pardon of Simon Dansiker, the other pirate captain in the play (also shown in dumbshow). Dansiker's reform is complicated by the reluctance of the French merchants he's robbed to accept him—until he returns to Tunis to apprehend the renegade Jew, Benwash. The unrepentant Ward dies at the end of the play—though he delivers an anti-Muslim rant that conforms to the prejudices of the play's original audience. (This was a large leap of dramatic license on Daborne's part, since the real Ward would die eleven years after the play was written.) |
1 Litre of Tears | null | null | Aya Kitō was diagnosed with a disease called spinocerebellar degeneration when she was 15 years old. The disease causes the person to lose control over their body, but because the person can retain all mental ability the disease acts as a prison. So in the end she cannot eat, walk or talk. Through family, medical examinations and rehabilitations, and finally succumbing to the disease, Aya must cope with the disease and live on with life until her death at the age of 25. A Litre of Tears is the film version of the drama. A Japanese TV drama, with the same title 1 Litre no Namida, was aired by Fuji TV in 2005 based on the life of Aya. The main character Aya Ikeuchi, played by Erika Sawajiri, depicts a girl with the same disease as Aya Kitō who goes through many of the same problems. |
The Debt Collector | null | 2,007 | An immortal beauty makes a bargain with a dying hard edged despot. He enters her service and learns of worlds he never knew existed. She guides him through many journeys, where he encounters strange and powerful creatures. He is never sure of her motives and she is never certain he can be trusted. Together they face perils and intrigues and learn each other’s deepest secrets. This emotionally powerful story grabs your attention and never lets go. The story is written in first person as a retrospective. The setting is a mythological world. The novel is 454 pages divided into two volumes. |
Attack of the Killer Potatoes | null | null | The story tells of several potatoes exposed to chemicals. The chemicals cause the potatoes to rapidly grow in size, become clever and sapient, and begin an attack on humanity. In essence, the book is a parody of the creature-feature films of the 1950s, combined with the oddball satire of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. |
The Three Robbers | Tomi Ungerer | 1,962 | The three robbers are very successful in their exploits, but one day there is a different treasure in the carriage they have stopped. There is only a lonely girl named Tiffany on her way to live with a wicked aunt, so the robbers carry Tiffany off to their hideout. When Tiffany sees all of the treasure the robbers have collected, she asks what it is for, and the robbers have no answer. Later the robbers decide to open an orphanage with their wealth and all uncared children go to live there. In October 2008 Phaidon Press Inc. will release an English language edition of the book. |
The Last Summer | Ann Brashares | 2,007 | The story is set on Fire Island, and also partly in nearby New York City. Alice, age 21, and Riley, 24, are two sisters. Nearly every summer of their lives, they have shared the same childhood friend, Paul, 24, whose widowed mother owns a Fire Island beach mansion next door to the smaller beach house of the girls and their parents. Paul has been absent for three summers, having been studying and volunteering in California. Alice is smart, graceful and elegant, planning on applying to law school at NYU. Riley is the athletic and adventurous one, having life-guarded on the island since she was fifteen. She is dyslexic and has attended outdoor leadership school in Colorado. Paul is something of a hippie, following in his father's footsteps. He can be moody and is wary of trusting people. During the summer, Alice and Paul start to have feelings outside of friendship for each other. Paul goes to great lengths to hide his feelings about Alice. They both realize they have always loved one another, but now in a different way. Alice even goes as far to give Paul her virginity one night on the beach. They continue sneaking around, hiding their relationship from their families. One night when Alice has gone over to Paul's house to make love, the emergency alarm goes off during the middle of the night. Alice dismisses the alarm as an elderly person needing attention, but it is not so; the person being helicoptered out is her own sister, Riley. It seems Riley is suffering from rheumatic heart disease. Alice is overwhelmed with guilt and a rush of feelings. She suddenly leaves the island without explanation to be with her hospitalized sister and parents, leaving Paul puzzled and hurt. Riley refuses to face the urgency of the situation and insists that her medical condition be kept secret from Paul until she can tell him herself. The following summer, Alice postpones graduate school to work as a groundskeeper and store cashier near the family's Manhattan home, while Riley awaits a donor heart transplant. Alice buys Riley an indoor pool membership, which Riley is grateful for, trying to carry on normally and ignore her medical condition. During a swim, Riley misses an important opportunity to receive a heart transplant. While the rest of her family is upset over this, Riley insists that they stay out of her business, saying that she can take care of herself. Meanwhile Paul, studying philosophy at NYU, is constantly thinking about Alice and his feelings towards her. Still unaware of Riley's condition, he is bitter and angry towards Alice. He even attends an old island acquaintance's wedding with a beautiful date to spite her. Riley finally tells Paul of her medical problems, admitting that she isn't entirely sure she wants a heart transplant. Paul's mother gives him the beach mansion, which he clears out and sells for $3 million. He donates the money to Bellevue Hospital, where his wealthy but wild-living father died long ago. One night back in the city, Alice returns from work to find Riley has died. The funeral is held and Alice and her parents go to Fire Island to spread her ashes. Alice volunteers to tend to the beach house, as the family has decided to sell it. Paul turns up one day, discovering his house has been sold to a new family whose children Alice babysits each morning. The story ends with Alice and Paul having sex and leaving the Island for the first time together; she has decided to apply to NYU school of social work and be with Paul. |
Mission to Mercury | Hugh Walters | 1,965 | The manned expedition to Mercury is complicated by the fact that strong solar radiation makes communication with Earth impossible. U.N.E.X.A. decide that telepathy may be the answer. Telepathic twins Gill and Gail volunteer; one accompanying Chris Godfrey and the crew on the mission; the other remaining on Earth. As they near their objective, Gail notices increasingly disruptive personality changes in the crew caused by the radiation, their only chance of survival is to land on the 'dark' side of the planet; however the near absolute zero conditions lead to massive heat-loss. Can they be rescued before freezing to death... In the same year this book was published, radar observations of Mercury showed that it did not have a synchronous orbit and that the same face was not always in darkness. |
Buddy | Nigel Hinton | null | Buddy is a young boy who is often picked on for being poor. He lives with his mum and dad. It all starts when Buddy wants some money for a school trip, he was unable to go on previous school trips because he didn't have the money. When his mum tells him she doesn't have any money to give him, Buddy ends up taking the money from his mum's purse. At the end of the day, his mum finds the money missing and asks Buddy where he put the money, after revealing that he did take the money, his mum said "Like father, like son", as his dad was previously sent to prison for breaking and entering. Before leaving she adds "thief", and leaves Buddy crying. The next day Buddy finds out his mum has left. Four months later, with his mum still missing, he is often called dustman at school often by his teacher and his classmates due to the state of his clothes and his amount of money in his family. In fact, 'The Beast' is just a man with learning difficulties named Ralph James Campbell. Meanwhile, Buddy finds out that his dad has a job and works a night shift, but he refuses to tell Buddy what it is. Buddy feels suspicious. After Buddy has a parents consultation evening with his dad coming in a 'teddy boy' outfit and Buddy feeling embarrassed, his dad goes to work and Buddy is left in the house on his own. When he looks out the window, he thinks the Beast is standing outside the house. He later hears the door bell ring and he finds it is his mum. She takes him for a snack at the snack bar at the Bus station and later gives him the address to the flat she shared with a friend from work and says that he can see her anytime he wants. His dad`s motorbike gets towed. After his dad gets his motorbike back, agio Harley Davidson also known as the 'arley, he takes Buddy for a ride out, he then has a tournament with Buddy on the pinball machine before going to work. Later on in the night, Buddy wakes to find his dad in the bathroom with his hands bleeding. He claims he fell of his Harley however Buddy doesn't believe him. Buddy finds a briefcase behind the door containing jewellery and believes that his dad has stolen it. The next day he convinces his dad to admit that he had been stealing and Buddy starts crying, he asks his dad to stop and his dad tells him he'll try. He also asks him to ring a man about the jewellery who he says is called Mr King. When Mr King comes over to Buddy's house to discuss something with his dad, he hears his dad telling Mr King that he doesn't want a job of stealing anymore however Mr King takes no notice and tells him he will give him till Friday for his hands to get better before they have a meeting at 56 Croxley Street. Buddy decides enough is enough and forms a plan to get Mr King arrested, it involves keeping his dad away from 56 Croxley Street long enough for Mr King to enter 56 (he does this by convincing his mum to go and see his dad). Then, Charmian has to telephone the police and tell them someone is breaking in to 56 and wait for Mr King to get arrested. However, Buddy finds Mr King leaves Croxley Street before the police arrive. Later, his dad arrives on his bike leaving Buddy to find out him and his mum didn't work out. Buddy tells his dad he called the police however Buddy's dad enters 56 to check on the owner of the House (the Beast) who Buddy forgot about, shortly after that the police arrive and go in the house and later come out with Buddy's dad, the briefcase of jewels, and the Beast (known as Ralph). They both enter the car calmly and Ralph has his head in his hands, Buddy isn't sure as he sees his dad put his arm round Ralph. After spending two nights at Julius and Charmian's house Buddy decides to escape to the country to avoid being put in care, he gets supplies from his house including a sleeping bag, and then goes to the bus station and gets on a bus (although originally planning to go to West Axle he then gets off the bus early before it gets dark). By the time he gets off the bus it's dark, he tries to head to a barn but gets stopped by two aggressive dogs. In the end he shelters in the wooden bus stop in his sleeping bag. The next morning, which happens to be his fourteenth birthday, he heads to shelter in 56 Croxley Street and succeeds until the Beast returns after Buddy's dad told the police the truth that he hadn't been in on it. Later, he goes to his mum's friend's house to find he is the main headline in the paper and that he is said to be missing. His mum's friend tells Buddy that his mum and dad are looking for him at his house, he goes there to find them both (his dad was bailed out by his mum). Six months later, Buddy's dad is due on trial, he decides to plead guilty and gets 18 months (a year and a half). He also asks Buddy and his mum to play a Buddy Holly song everyday (The song turns out to be Everyday by Buddy Holly). The lyrics indicate that his dad won't be long and that he still loves them in the end. Buddy's death-klaraerbest Buddy was killed in a plane crash,along with two other members of the group, and the plane driver. Buddy was only at the early age of 22. The plane crashed within minutes of takeoff from the Mason city IA Airport, at around 1 AM CST. The plane had crashed into Iowa. countryside. That was the day Buddy Holly's music died along side with him! |
Spaceship to Saturn | Hugh Walters | 1,967 | The length of the trip to Saturn means that the crew will undergo 'hypothermia' for the duration of the flight, however a massive increase in meteor activity around Saturn threatens to cancel the mission as the computer on Earth will be unable to manoeuvre the craft at such long distances to avoid collisions. The solution - instantaneous telepathy; twins Gill and Gail maintain a telepathic carrier-wave even under hypothermia which can be modulated to carry telemetry. A landing is attempted on Titan but problems arise requiring the ship to be flown through the Cassini division, a narrow gap in the rings of Saturn... |
Phoenix And Ashes | Mercedes Lackey | 2,005 | Phoenix and Ashes is about a girl named Eleanor Robinson and a pilot named Reginald Fenyx. Eleanor's mother died and her father remarried a woman named Alison, who already had two daughters. When her father was killed in the Great War, Alison showed her true nature as an Elemental Master of Earth who practiced the dark blood-fueled arts. Eleanor was bound to the hearth by a fearsome ritual and people forgot all about her. Reginald Fenyx, an aristocrat and an Elemental Master of Air, loved to fly. During the Great War, he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps, and became known as an air ace. However, he met another Elemental in combat and crashed; he was trapped under rubble for days while dark Earth creatures tormented him. This was particularly torturous because Air (Reginald's Element) is the opposite of Earth. When he was rescued, he was a traumatized and broken man who had abandoned magic. The main plot of the book involves Alison's attempts to marry one of her daughters to Reginald and become nobility. Meanwhile, Eleanor's ability to use Fire magic awakens, with the tutelage of her godmother Sarah and strange beings who visit her in dreams. Reginald appears briefly in another novel in the series, The Serpent's Shadow, which is set a few years before he becomes a pilot in World War I/The Great War. At this time he is an Oxford student and Dr. Maya Witherspoon's future fiancee, Peter Scott, remarks that while Reginald is studying to be a lawyer, the boldness of his personality marked him as a future military man instead. |
Bread Givers | Anzia Yezierska | null | Bread Givers, a Jewish-American female coming-of-age story written by Anzia Yezierska, begins with a 10-year old Sara Smolinsky. Sara lives with her mother, Shenah, her father, Reb, and her three sisters, Bessie, Fania, and Mashah in the Lower East Side tenement of New York City. As the story opens, the Smolinskys are destitute, with the five women struggling for money to simply survive and Reb concerned only with the study of the Jewish sacred texts. The opening chapter depicts the family's financial struggles and the Smolinsky family dynamics. Additionally, this chapter hints at the struggle between Sara, who yearns for American ideals independence, and her father, who clings obsessively to traditional Jewish culture. The following three chapters center on Reb's complete domination of Sara's three sisters as they each fall in love, have their suitors rejected by their father, and end in arranged marriages. These marriages, arranged by Reb for his financial comfort, bring the three daughters great misery. Bessie marries Zalmon the fish-peddler seemingly because she pities his children. Mashah is wedded to Moe Mirsky, a man pretending to be a diamond dealer, but is actually just a middle man. He spends all of his money on showy clothes and lets his family go hungry. Fania ends up marrying a gambler, Abe Schmukler, who buys her affection and shows her off to appear rich. Sara witnesses the devastation her father causes her sisters and vows that she will not follow in their footsteps; she will marry only a man she loves. The next chapters detail the family's further financial misfortune as Reb struggles to understand American business practices and is continually hoodwinked. The tension between Reb and Sara escalates quickly when she is forced to move to a new town and work in her father's store, where he constantly displays his inaptitude for business yet refuses to take advice from his wife and Sara. Eventually, Sara moves back to New York City and decides she wants to become a teacher. While living with her parents, Sara primarily experienced Jewish-American culture. However, her college experience is where she first interacts solely with the predominantly American culture. In order to pay for school and get good grades, Sara must ignore everything else, including her family, to work and study. Slowly and painfully, Sara learns to talk, dress and act like her American peers. She leaves college with her teaching degree and $1,000 which she won in an essay contest. Feeling successful, Sara returns home (only a short distance physically, but light-years apart otherwise) to find her mother fatally ill. After her mother's death, her father remarries only to find his new wife, Mrs. Feinstein, is a gold-digger after his late wife's lodge money. Sara and her sisters, still furious over their father's treatment of them, become enraged at his quick marriage after their mother's death and refuse to help him when his new wife spends all his money and refuses to work. Sara goes back to New York and finds a teaching job. Mrs. Feinstein is not satisfied with Reb's money and wants more from his daughters. She is angry that Sara is avoiding her father, so she writes a nasty letter to the principal of the school where Sara is teaching, Hugo Seelig, in an effort to give her a bad reputation. Instead, the principal sympathizes with Sara and feels Mrs. Feinstein is desperate and pathetic. Sara is relieved and eventually she and Hugo, who is also a Polish-American, start dating. Sara feels she has left her old life completely behind and wants to find a way to give back to the community. While pondering this, she finds her father practically on his deathbed, literally lying in the gutter selling chewing gum. Sara asks her father to come live with her and Hugo. Moses is concerned whether he can share the same roof with Sara. He says he will come if they "promise to keep sacred all that is sacred to [him]." In the end, Sara is still haunted by her father and his old-fashioned culture. |
Nightwood | Djuna Barnes | 1,936 | Nightwood focuses on Robin Vote, a woman in constant search of "secure torment." Robin's story begins in Europe, where she meets, and marries the false Baron Felix Volkbein, who wants nothing more than an heir to carry on his family name and uphold the traditions of old European nobility. The birth of their son, Guido, causes Robin to realize that she does not wish to carry on this life. She moves to America, where she begins a romantic relationship with Nora Flood. The two move to Paris together. But Robin is unable to remain peacefully with Nora. She feels driven by the conflicts of "love and anonymity," and spends her nights away from home, having flings with strangers while Nora waits nervously for her lover's return. During one such night Robin meets Jenny Petherbridge, a widow four times over, who "gains happiness by stealing the joy of others." Jenny turns her attention to stealing Robin away from Nora, and succeeds. In her despair, Nora (like Felix before her) turns to the counsel of Dr. Matthew O'Connor to recover from the loss of Robin. Some time later, Nora has returned to America, and is camping in a forest with her dog when she discovers Robin kneeling before an altar in an abandoned church. Attempting to enter, Nora hits the door jamb, and is knocked unconscious. Robin and the dog frolic on the floor before finally succumbing to sleep. |
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