Twist of Gold

Twist of Gold

Michael Morpurgo

Children's Books / Poetry / Historical Fiction

Sean and Annie have one chance to escape the potato famine in Ireland, and after surviving a shipwreck they land safely in America in search for their father. But their new land is one of hardship and they live in poverty on the streets of Boston. However, their adventure is just beginning. After living aboard a steamboat they then join pioneers traveling across the prairies. Their music and dancing bring joy to all they meet, but their family "torc"—a golden necklace—brings both blessings and curses, and thieves prowl to get hold of it. Annie and Sean must protect their torc as they search for their father: their family’s survival depends on it.
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White Jenna

White Jenna

Jane Yolen

Children's / Literature & Fiction / Young Adult

World Fantasy Award for Best Novel ALA Best Books for Young Adults Book Two of the Great Alta Saga Jenna was the White Queen. Skada was the Dark Queen. She is bound to Jenna—the other half of Jenna’s self. Drawn out of a mirror by a rite of magic, a “dark sister” is confined to the dark. She vanishes in daylight. It is in this other world the dark sisters wait for moonlight or lamplight to call them forth again. This is their story: of myths turned real, ordinary people turned heroes, a land turned inside out by the coming of White Jenna.
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The Sun Between Their Feet

The Sun Between Their Feet

Doris Lessing

Fiction

The second volume of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. "As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country." — Doris Lessing, from the Preface. This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words, "Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape."
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The Zayat Kiss: Short Story

The Zayat Kiss: Short Story

Sax Rohmer

Mystery & Thrillers / Science Fiction & Fantasy

Inspector Nayland Smith has unearthed a plot that could mean the end of civilization as we know it. He's just arrived in London, chasing the greatest criminal mind ever to come from the East. But when he arrives to warn Sir Crichton Davey that he is in danger, he finds he is too late. Sir Crichton has become the first victim of the insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu.
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All About Women

All About Women

Andrew M. Greeley

Mystery & Thrillers / Literature & Fiction / Religion & Spirituality

You're in for an unforgettable experience when America's master storyteller turns his enormous narrative gifts to the passionate, haunting subject of the American woman, searching for—and often finding—love and faith.There's teenaged Rosemarie, coming to grips with the evil of the twentieth century—or is it the evil in the human heart?Peggy, whose widowhood plunges her into the cold of loneliness.Rita, whose marriage is rich and fulfilling—except at its core.Laura, torn between three lovers, one of them a seminarian.Julie, haunted by something that happened long ago.Sionna Marie, an imp diving passionately into adulthood.And Patricia, caught in a web she may not have the power to break.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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Gamearth

Gamearth

Kevin J. Anderson

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Paranormal / Humor and Comedy

Product DescriptionIt was supposed to be just another Sunday night fantasy role-playing game for David, Tyrone, Scott, and Melanie. But after years of playing, the game had become so real that all their creations—humans, sorcerers, dragons, ogres, panther-folk, cyclops—now had existences of their own. And when the four outside players decide to end their game, the characters inside the world of Gamearth—warriors, scholars, and the few remaining wielders of magic—band together to keep their land from vanishing. Now they must embark on a desperate quest for their own magic—magic that can twist the Rules enough to save them all from the evil that the players created to destroy their entire world.
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The Girl Who Was Plugged In

The Girl Who Was Plugged In

James Tiptree Jr

James Tiptree Jr

The story takes place in a dystopian future where the world is controlled by a capitalist regime. Despite advertising being illegal ("ad" is, in fact, a dirty word), corporations are still able to persuade and control consumers by the celebrities they create for product placement. The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Philadelphia Burke, or P. Burke, is enlisted to become one of these celebrities after a suicide attempt fueled by society ostracizing her due to her Pituitary Dystrophy, better known as Cushing's Disease. While recovering in the hospital, she is chosen by a scout to become a "Remote Operator" for the beautiful corporate creation, known as Delphi, who was grown without a functioning brain from a modified embryo in an artificial womb. Though Delphi appears to be a normal fifteen-year-old-girl, she is controlled through a satellite linked to P. Burke's brain, which is still physically located in her original body.
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Soul/Mate

Soul/Mate

Joyce Carol Oates

Literature & Fiction / Short Stories / Criticism

A lonely widow is romanced by a “brilliantly portrayed” pathological killer in this novel by the National Book Award–winning author of them (The New York Times)*. Dorothea Deverell is a New England art historian working for a Boston museum, resigned to entering middle age alone—until she’s swept off her feet by the flattery of a charming younger man who calls her his soul mate. Colin Asch is swept away too. He admires Dorothea’s gentle nature, innate goodness, decency, and acceptance of others without judgment. She’s nothing at all like the people Colin has met before—and murdered. A self-appointed “Angel of Death,” Colin is determined to keep Dorothea happy—by eliminating anyone who gets in the way of his plan. They’ll be clever kills, untraceable and fast as a knife-slash to the throat. Each one will bring him closer to the woman he loves. And by the time Dorothea discovers what horrors passion has wrought, she’ll be in so deep, so dark, that giving in might be her only chance of survival. This novel, called “a hair-raiser” by Elmore Leonard, comes from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of We Were the Mulvaneys, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and recipient of the O. Henry Award, the National Book Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. In Soul/Mate, “it is clear from the start that we are in Joyce Carol Oates territory, for the book is stamped with her hallmarks—her complex, detailed prose; her fascination with violence; her obsessive concern with rendering not so much action as the way action haunts the hidden consciousness of her characters” (The New York Times).*
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Win, Lose or Die

Win, Lose or Die

John Gardner

Literature & Fiction

When M receives word that a terrorist organisation known is planning to infiltrate and destroy a top-secret British Royal Navy aircraft carrier-based summit of world leaders, James Bond is returned to active duty in the Royal Navy. Promoted from Commander to Captain, Bond is expected to infiltrate the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible and identify potential sleeper agents. As he struggles to complete his mission, a massive war game is being carried out between the American, British, and Soviet Navies. And when Bond gets caught up in a murder investigation the safety of the most powerful leaders on the planet hangs in the balance ...
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Kristy and the Mother's Day Surprise

Kristy and the Mother's Day Surprise

Ann M. Martin

Children's Books / Young Adult

Mother's Day is coming up and the Baby-sitters have the same problem they do every year: What do they get their mothers? Kristy, especially, wants to do something nice for her mom. Mrs. Brewer has been acting kind of strange and secretive lately, and Kristy's worried about her... But then Kristy gets another one of her great ideas. Why don't the Baby-sitters treat their moms - and the mothers of the kids they sit for - to a day off without any kids around? The BSC plans a gigantic baby-sitting party. It's a Mother's Day surprise that couldn't be beat! ... Until Kristy's mom reveals a very special surprise of her own.
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The Forgotten

The Forgotten

Elie Wiesel

Memoir / Fiction

Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late. Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible

John Kennedy Toole

Fiction

The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly funny, sad, shrewd, gathering force from page to page with an emotional directness that never lapses into sentimentality. Through it we share his awkward, painful, universally recognizable encounter with first love, we participate in boy evangelist Bobbie Lee Taylor's revival, we meet the pious, bigoted townspeople. From the opening lines of The Neon Bible, David is fully alive, naive yet sharply observant, drawing us into his world through the sure artistry of John Kennedy Toole. John Kennedy Toole, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, wrote The Neon Bible for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.
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Separate Rooms

Separate Rooms

Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Pier Vittorio Tondelli

"A story of love and youth and pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people's hands. Surely one of the best novels I've ever read." —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is LostSoon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino, Separate Rooms is a masterpiece of Italian literature, and a heartbreaking portrait of love, grief, and the daily realities of being a gay man in 1980s Europe.Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living and the dead.He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and...
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