John Taylor is a P.I. with a special talent for finding lost things in the dark and secret center of London known as the Nightside. He's also the reluctant owner of a very special—and dangerous—weapon. Excalibur, the legendary sword. To find out why he was chosen to wield it, John must consult the Last Defenders of Camelot, a group of knights who dwell in a place that some find more frightening than the Nightside.

London Proper. It's been years since John's been back—and there are good reasons for that.

Presented in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding anthology

A novel about survival, self-reliance, and art, by Peter Stamm, finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

All Days Are Night is the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful TV host, content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, hits a deer on the wet road and dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital completely disfigured. Only slowly, after many twists and turns, does she put her life back together, and reconnects with a love interest of the past who becomes a possible future — or so it seems. In Stamm’s unadorned and haunting style, this new novel forcefully tells the story of a woman who loses her life but must stay alive all the same. How she works everything out in the end is at once surprising and incredibly rewarding.

In McAuley’s follow-up to Child of the River, named a PW Best Book of 1998, Yama continues his quest for identity, still pursued by the implacable Prefect Corin of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, who would subvert Yama’s burgeoning psychic powers and put them to use in the war against the Heretics. Confluence is a planet-sized, needle-shaped artificial environment set millions of years in the future by the Preservers, humanity’s distant descendants, to orbit a star. Nearby is the Eye of the Preservers, a massive black hole within which the galaxy’s remaining humans have evidently hidden themselves, for reasons unknown. The inhabitants of Confluence, the 10,000 bloodlines, are, apparently without exception, animals, some of earthly origin and others not, all genetically engineered for human intelligence and form. Yama, an orphan of mysterious parentage, is a Builder, a member of a bloodline thought long extinct. His desire to uncover the mystery behind his birth is the motivating force for both his quest and the series. Throughout, he is opposed not just by Prefect Corin but by other intelligent beings, both organic and inorganic, who would bend him to their will.

An unforgettable debut novel about a boy who goes missing, a family that is torn apart, and a nation on the brink.

During the rainy season of 1995, in the bustling town of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, one family's life is disrupted by the sudden disappearance of seventeen-year-old Paul Utu, beloved brother and son. As they grapple with the sudden loss of their darling boy, they embark on a painful and moving journey of immense power which changes their lives forever and shatters the fragile ecosystem of their once ordered family. Ajie, the youngest sibling, is burdened with the guilt of having seen Paul last and convinced that his vanished brother was betrayed long ago. But his search for the truth uncovers hidden family secrets and reawakens old, long forgotten ghosts as rumours of police brutality, oil shortages, and frenzied student protests serve as a backdrop to his pursuit.

In a tale that moves seamlessly back and forth through time, Ajie relives a trip to the family's ancestral village where, together, he and his family listen to the myths of how their people settled there, while the villagers argue over the mysterious Company, who found oil on their land and will do anything to guarantee support. As the story builds towards its stunning conclusion, it becomes clear that only once past and present come to a crossroads will Ajie and his family finally find the answers they have been searching for.

And After Many Days introduces Ile's spellbinding ability to tightly weave together personal and political loss until, inevitably, the two threads become nearly indistinguishable. It is a masterful story of childhood, of the delicate, complex balance between the powerful and the powerless, and a searing portrait of a community as the old order gives way to the new.

Jay McInerney's first novel since the best-selling The Good Life a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story — a literary and commercial read of the highest order.

Russell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the New York dream: book parties one night and high-society charity events the next; jobs they care about (and actually enjoy); twin children, a boy and a girl whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in TriBeCa and summers in the Hamptons. But all of this comes at a high cost. Russell, an independent publisher, has cultural clout but minimal cash; as he navigates an industry that requires, beyond astute literary taste, constant financial improvisation, he encounters an audacious, expensive and potentially ruinous opportunity. Meanwhile, instead of seeking personal profit in this incredibly wealthy city, Corrine is devoted to feeding its hungry poor, and they soon discover they're being priced out of their now fashionable neighborhood.

Then Corrine's world is turned upside down when the man with whom she'd had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11 suddenly reappears. As the novel unfolds across a period of stupendous change-including Obama's historic election and the global economic collapse he inherited — the Calloways will find themselves and their marriage tested more severely than they ever could have anticipated.

This brilliant memoir brings to life an entire era through the sensibility of one of America's finest authors. Recollecting fifty years of love, desire and friendship, Burning the Days traces the life of a singular man, who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before reinventing himself as a writer in the New York of the 1960s.

It features — in Salter's uniquely beautiful style — some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who influenced him. This is a book that through its sheer sensual force not only recollects the past, but reclaims it.

Wir schreiben das Jahr 2047: Indien feiert hundert Jahre Unabhängigkeit. Doch in dem Land, das mit seinen pulsierenden Großstädten, hypermodernen Computern und Künstlichen Intelligenzen in der Moderne angekommen ist, werden auch zerstörerische Tendenzen sichtbar. Zehn Menschen treiben durch diesen Mahlstrom der Technologien und Kulturen, unter ihnen ein Gangster, ein Polizist, ein Wissenschaftler, ein Politiker, ein Ausgestoßener und ein Stand-up-Comedian. Sie alle werden in den Wochen um das Jahrhundertereignis in den Strudel der Ereignisse gezogen, die das Schicksal Indiens für immer verändern werden: Ein Krieg bricht aus, Künstliche Intelligenzen verselbstständigen sich — und eine Botschaft aus dem All wird entschlüsselt. Und während sich zwischen Slums und Großrechnern die digitale Zukunft der Menschheit entfaltet, fließt der große Ganges weiter durch Cyberabad …

»Es gibt nur wenige Autoren, deren Romane unsere Sicht auf die Welt verändern — mit Cyberabad zählt Ian McDonald dazu.«

Time Magazine

A collection of eight stories, “Cyberabad Days” is a triumphant return to the India of 2047 (the India of River of Gods); a new, muscular superpower in an age of artificial intelligences, climate-change induced drought, strange new genders, and genetically improved children.

The greatest superpower of all isn't to be part spider, part man, or to cast magic spells – the greatest power is the power to create.

Daniel has that power.

Daniel's secret abilities – like being able to manipulate objects and animals with his mind or to recreate himself in any shape he chooses – have helped him survive. But Daniel doesn't have a normal life. He is the protector of the earth, the Alien Hunter, with a mission beyond what anyone could imagine.

From the day that his parents were brutally murdered in front of his very eyes, Daniel has used his unique gifts to hunt down their assassin. Finally, with the help of The List bequeathed to him in his parents' dying breath, he has located the killer.

Now, on his own, he vows to take on his father's mission-and to have vengeance in the process.

In 2010, a nineteen-year-old super-fan rushed the stage during a Lamb of God concert in Prague. To protect himself, singer Randy Blythe pushed the fan away. Unbeknownst to Blythe, the young man hit his head on the floor when he fell and later died from the injury. Blythe was promptly incarcerated on charges carrying a prison term of five to ten years. Thirty-seven days later, he was released on bail to await trial. Although legal experts told him not to return to the Czech Republic to face the charges, Blythe explained that he “could not run away from this problem while the grieving family of a dead young man searched hopelessly for answers that [he] might help provide.

After a five-day trial, he was acquitted on March 5, 2013.

In Dark Days, Blythe tells the story of his incarceration and the wild life that led up to it. As he explains, “Most substance abuse books end with the author getting sober. My book starts there.”

From the acclaimed Nordic Council Literature Prize winner, a story that reveals the devastating effects of mistaking silence for peace and feeling shame for inevitable circumstances.

Eva and Simon have spent most of their adult lives together. He is a physician and she is a teacher, and they have three grown daughters and a comfortable home. Yet what binds them together isn’t only affection and solidarity but also the painful facts of their respective histories, which they keep hidden even from their own children. But after the abrupt dismissal of their housekeeper and Simon’s increasing withdrawal into himself, the past can no longer be repressed.

Lindstrøm has crafted a masterpiece about the grave mistakes we make when we misjudge the legacy of war, common prejudices, and our own strategies of survival.

The second book in the multi-generational Edilean series, Days of Gold is a sweeping romance set in 1766.

Days of Infamy is a re-imagining of the Pacific War. The major difference being that the Empire of Japan not only attacks Pearl Harbor, but follows it up with the landing and occupation of Hawaii. The logic of how the battle could have developed in Oahu, including the destruction of Halsey's fleet, is presented in detail. As is usual in Turtledove novels the action occurs from several points of view. Besides historical figures these include a corporal in the Japanese Army, a surfer (who invents the sailboard so he can fish once Honolulu is occupied), Nisei children caught between the warring cultures, prisoners of war, and others. The way that control of the islands allows Japan to dominate much of the southern Pacific Ocean is explored, and the capure of a modern (for the time) radar system in noted. There is also a reverse Battle of Midway where an invading American force is defeated. Eventually, as was common in their other occupied territories, the Japanese create a puppet government, ruling through a member of the Hawaiian Royal Family who lives in the Iolani Palace.

Eve Duncan and her adopted daughter, Jane Macguire, are pitted against the members of a secretive cult who have targeted Jane and have decided that she will he their ultimate sacrifice. In eight days they will come for her. In eight days, what Jane fears the most will become a reality. In eight days, she will die. It all begins with a painting that Jane, an artist, displays in her Parisian gallery. The painting is called "Guilt" and Jane has no idea how or why she painted the portrait of the chilling face. But the members of a cult that dates back to the time of Christ believe that Jane's blasphemy means she must die. But first. she will lead them to an ancient treasure whose value is beyond price. This elusive treasure, and Jane's death, are all that they need for their power to come to ultimate fruition. With Eve's help, can Jane escape before the clock stops ticking?

Written by the winner of the Hub Nugget Writer 2012 Award.

A half-billion would die before it was over…

The day the Iranians set off a forty megaton nuke marked the beginning of a new world order. The Russians covertly assist the Admiral who sets a plan in motion disrupting the world’s oil supply that will ultimately alter the course of history.

The Western World is panic stricken with the thought that Iran threatens first Israel, then the entire world with nuclear destruction. The Iranian president continues his ranting at the UN that Allah has willed the destruction of the evil Zionists.

Old hostilities are tossed aside and new alliances are formed in smoke filled backrooms of the UN, the Kremlin and the White House. Third world nations, particularly Somalia, suddenly become strategically important and the super powers struggle to sort it all out and battle for position. The stakes could not be higher.

Houston Robinson, better known as Watchdogg, an unofficial Cabinet advisor to the president, sets out to discover the truth to all the crises that suddenly appear out of nowhere. Tourists are mysteriously kidnapped off the streets of Europe and surface in the largest supertanker hijacking in history. The USS George H.W. Bush is a target of an Iranian airbus attack in the Indian Ocean. Pandemonium in the oil futures markets sends oil prices to dizzying heights in a Venezuela Chinese oil coup. The entire planet it seems is being turned upside down when the Admiral seizes the world’s oil supply. Economies crumble at a dizzying pace while others flourish depending upon their role in the new order.

Watchdogg finds himself in backroom politics with the Amir Harazi the Prime Minister of Israel who has plans of his own to bring a stop to the Iranian missiles that threaten to destroy his country in another Holocaust.

You will be taken into the cockpits of Super Hornets and Lightning II’s with the men and women who carry out the orders of world leaders. You’ll witness the agonizing decisions of generals and commanders who place their careers on the line carrying out the orders of presidents and prime ministers. Inevitably Watchdogg runs head to head with the Admiral. Millions of lives hang in the balance as the world threatens to self destruct from greed and power.

This story is taken from tomorrow’s headlines. It’s a prophetic tale that will scare you with its chilling back room deals and double-crosses. Who is friend? Who is foe?

It’s a good thing Watchdogg is here to figure it all out and see that the Admiral’s plan to hijack the world’s oil is waylaid. Should he do it? Can he do it? Let’s hope so.

Najeeb’s dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape of his village and of his loving family haunt Najeeb whose only solace is the companionship of goats. In the end, the lonely young man contrives a hazardous scheme to escape his desert prison.

Goat Days was published to acclaim in Malayalam and became a bestseller. One of the brilliant new talents of Malayalam literature, Benyamin’s wry and tender telling transforms this strange and bitter comedy of Najeeb’s life in the desert into a universal tale of loneliness and alienation.

Colson Whitehead’s eagerly awaited and triumphantly acclaimed new novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival. It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men, and turn-of-the-century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come.

Intense and profoundly unsettling, Brian Evenson’s Last Days is a down-the-rabbit-hole detective novel set in an underground religious cult. The story follows Kline, a brutally dismembered detective forcibly recruited to solve a murder inside the cult. As Kline becomes more deeply involved with the group, he begins to realize the stakes are higher than he previously thought. Attempting to find his way through a maze of lies, threats, and misinformation, Kline discovers that his survival depends on an act of sheer will. Last Days was first published in 2003 as a limited edition novella titled The Brotherhood of Mutilation. Its success led Evenson to expand the story into a full-length novel. In doing so, he has created a work that’s disturbing, deeply satisfying, and completely original.

Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. In each of these "weird and wonderful stories" (Boston Globe), Brad Watson writes about people and dogs: dogs as companions, as accomplices, and as unwitting victims of human passions; and people responding to dogs as missing parts of themselves. "Elegant and elegiac, beautifully pitched to the human ear, yet resoundingly felt in our animal hearts" (New York Newsday), Watson's vibrant prose captures the animal crannies of the human personality — yearning for freedom, mourning the loss of something wild, drawn to human connection but also to thoughtless abandon and savagery without judgment. Pinckney Benedict praises Watson's writing as "crisp as a morning in deer season, rife with spirited good humor and high intelligence," and Fred Chappell calls his stories "strong and true to the place they come from." This powerful debut collection marks Brad Watson's introduction into "a distinguished [Southern] literary heritage, from Faulkner to Larry Brown to Barry Hannah to Richard Ford" (The State, Columbia, South Carolina).

When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion—or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?

Nine Last Days on Planet Earth is a Tor.com Original from the award-winning science fiction author Daryl Gregory.

_{At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.}

Literary Awards: Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novelette (2019), Locus Award Nominee for Novelette (2019), Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award Nominee (2019)

BILLY ALFRETH IS SERVING FIVE YEARS as an inmate at Dellacotte Young Offenders Institute, in the north of England. Billy has memories of being attacked by three men, but CCTV footage doesn’t bear out his account and he is locked up for stabbing one man. Billy’s world overlaps with that of Ronald Dott, a serial rapist, who claims to know Billy from when he was a child, only that is impossible. And then there is Kate Thistle, ostensibly at Dellacotte to study prison slang, but inordinately interested in both Dott and Billy. As strange events occur and his reality begins to unravel, Billy learns of the Oasis, and a prison ship, and of a desert town called Hospital, where time works in mysterious ways. Dott tells Billy of their terrible entwined histories… whether or not Billy wants to be convinced of what he cannot understand.

“I experienced an acute, often surreal, sense of an offender’s pathology, with all its traps, humour and contradictions. O My Days is a tour de force of powerful writing. It’s demanding, gruelling yet always honest, insightful and finally moving. It explores areas that serious fiction rarely travels to. A quite remarkable novel.”

Alan Price, author of Outfoxing Hyenas

“This is a writer who has been there, viewed with compassion, and reported back. There is a new mythos here, something that feels ancient and sand-blasted and unfathomable, but it is revealed within the most modern of contexts. Highly recommended.”

Paul Meloy, author of Islington Crocodiles

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Summer Books 2016.

"Formally dazzling, playful and affecting, a new Oulipian classic." — Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and The End of Oulipo?

This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter — at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary — locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience.

Michèle Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.

In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother commits a desperate act: convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, she determines to stop it and becomes the lake's Dominatrix-Oracle, "the Queen of the Zed Night." Acclaimed by many critics as Steve Erickson's greatest novel, Our Ecstatic Days takes place on the forbidden landscape of a defiant heart.

"Gentleman Jim" Scott was a brilliant magnetic general. Like a lot of people, he believed the President was ruining the country. Unlike anyone else, he had the power to do something about it, something unprecedented and terrifying. Colonel "Jiggs" Casey was the marine who accidentally stumbled onto the plot. At first he refused to believe it; then he risked his life and career to inform the President. Jordan Lyman was President of the United States. By the time he was finally able to convince himself of the appalling truth, he had only seven days left to stop a brilliant, seemingly irresistible military plot to seize control of the government of the United States.

Seven Days in May is a political thriller novel written by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II and published in 1962. It was made into a motion picture in 1964, with a screenplay by Rod Serling, directed by John Frankenheimer, and starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

The story is said to have been influenced by the right-wing anti-Communist political activities of General Edwin A. Walker after he resigned from the military. The author, Knebel, got the idea for the book after interviewing then-Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay.

CIA operative Malcolm, codenamed Condor, discovers his colleagues butchered in a blood-spattered office, he realizes that only an oversight by the assassins has saved his life. He contacts CIA headquarters for help but when an attempted rendezvous goes wrong, it quickly becomes clear that no one can be trusted. Malcolm disappears into the streets of Washington, hoping to evade the killers long enough to unravel the conspiracy— but will that be enough to save his life?

“A master absurdist… Highly recommended.”

—The New York Times

Before the success of her debut SF-and-fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders was a rising star in SF and fantasy short fiction. Collected in a mini-book format, here—for the first time in print—are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:

In “The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model” aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created—and why we’ll never discover aliens.

“As Good as New” is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. “Intestate” is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren’t quite human anymore—but they’re still family.

“The Cartography of Sudden Death” demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.

“Six Months, Three Days” is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They’re both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

And “Clover”, exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia’s cat.

By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.

But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR—and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.

For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control—a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him.

In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last—and most terrible—of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock… the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

Specimen Daysis a 2005 novel by American writer Michael Cunningham. It contains three stories: one that takes place in the past, one in the present and one in the future. Each of the three stories depicts three central, semi-consistent character-types: a young boy, a man, and a woman. Walt Whitman’s poetry is also a common thread in each of the three stories and the title is from Whitman’s own prose works.

Ten Days by Gillian Slovo — a powerful and unputdownable thriller tracing a riot from its inception through to its impact one year on.

'Tension, trouble and tough truths — Gillian Slovo has written a cracker' Val McDermid

A page-turner thick with greed, ambition, love and secrets' Kamila Shamsie

It's 4 a.m. and dawn is about to break over the Lovelace estate.

Cathy Mason drags herself out of bed as she swelters in her overheated bedroom — the council still haven't turned the radiators off despite temperatures reaching the 30s.

In a kitchen across London, Home Secretary Peter Whiteley enjoys the tea that his security detail left for him before he joins his driver and heads to Parliament, whilst his new police chief, Joshua Yares, clears his head for his first day with a run.

All three will have reasons to recollect this morning as their lives collide over ten days they will never forget.

Ten Days takes an unflinching look at how lives are ruined and careers are made when small misjudgements have profound effects on frustrated communities and damaged individuals. Gillian Slovo's game-changing novel about political expediency and personal disenfranchisement is as page-turning as it is culturally significant.

The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A lot can happen in the dead days.

There is a magician called Valerian who must save his own life, or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him. Helping him is his servant Boy, a child with no name and no past, given to Valerian by Fate when he fell from his hiding place in an old church. And the quick-witted Willow is with them as they dig in death-fields at midnight, and are swept into the sprawling blackness of a subterranean city on a journey from which there is no escape. Unknown to any of them it is Boy who holds the key to all their destinies. His revelations will be shocking.

Set in dark, dangerous cities and in the frozen countryside of a distant time and place The Book of Dead Days, beautifully evoked and dramatic, conjures a spell-binding story of power, corruption and desperate magic.

"She is among the greatest Italian authors of recent years."-Corriere della Sera

"Ferrante dissects the personal microcosm so well, and with awesome lucidity and precision shows us the meanderings of a woman's mind, the suffering that accompanies being abandoned, and the awful rumbling of time passing."-El Mundo

"Elena Ferrante has given us a startlingly beautiful novel of exceptional and bold strength."-Il Manifesto

"Severe and rigorously unsentimental, packed full of passages written with dizzying intensity at a rare and acute pitch. Ferrante is at her best when her writing holds tight to those nagging, niggling obsessions that make up our mental landscapes."-La Stampa

A national bestseller for almost an entire year, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

Ian McDonald’s new tale, which begins with a passionate love story and takes us to the end of the universe and beyond, is set against the same background as his 1995 novel Terminal Café (Bantam). The author’s latest SF novel, Kirinya, is just out from Gollancz (UK). It’s a sequel to Evolution’s Shore, a book that Bantam published in paperback early last year. Mr. McDonald is currently writing Stupid Season—his first mainstream novel.

A novel based on the true story of how an advertising campaign caused the fall of Chile’s dictator, General Pinochet.

Nico, the son of a noted Chilean philosophy professor, witnesses his father’s arrest while he is teaching a class. Bettini, the father of Nico’s best friend, is a leftist advertising executive who has been blacklisted and is out of work after having been imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet’s police. This doesn’t stop the ministry of the interior from asking Bettini, who is the best in the business, to come up with a plan for the upcoming referendum designed to say “yes” to Pinochet’s next term. But just hours after he has been approached by the right, the head of the opposition makes him the exact same offer. What is Bettini going to do? Put his life on the line or sacrifice his political convictions? Finally he goes with the left. The next hurdle is finding a slogan that would be approved by the sixteen factions that comprise the opposition and who never agree on anything. Whiskey after whiskey, an idea finally emerges.

This is a vivacious tale that examines how advertising and politics come together during the Pinochet regime. But this is also a coming-of-age story where we see through Nico’s experience what it means to grow up in a country where nothing is allowed and almost any move can feel like an earnest act of resistance.

The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five books, each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. "How could it all have gone differently?" the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early 20th century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to another death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, but our heroine is sent to a labor camp. She is spared in the next chapter with the help of someone's intervention and returns to Berlin to become a respected writer.

The incomparable Joseph Roth imagines Emperor Napoleon's last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica — an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates.

Roth's signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. "There may be," as James Wood has stated, "no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile."

Strange things are happening: old friends disappearing, angels (or devils) clambering on the fire escapes of New York City. But for Pearl, Moz, and Zahler, all that matters is the band. As the city reels under a mysterious epidemic, the three combine their talents with a vampire lead singer and a drummer whose fractured mind can glimpse the coming darkness. Will their music stave off the end? Or summon it?

Set against the gritty apocalypse that began in Peeps, The Last Days is about five teenagers who find themselves creating the soundtrack for the end of the world.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Saddam's regime is buried. Baghdad lies in ruins. Now the eyes of the world are on Jon Bennett and Erin McCoy, two senior White House advisors, as they arrive in the Middle East to offer a historic Arab-Israeli peace plan and the American president's new vision of freedom and democracy. But in the shadows lie men whose hearts are filled with evil-men for whom the prospect of peace goes against everything they believe. And soon one terrifying scheme after another begins to unfold. As Jon and Erin face a battle for control of Jerusalem and the Holy Land and an Iraqi plan to rebuild ancient Babylon, they can't help but wonder: Are such signs evidence that they are living in the last days before the return of Christ?

With The Last Days of California, Mary Miller bursts into the literary world, taking up the mantle of Southern fiction and rendering it her own with wry vulnerability and contemporary urgency.

Miller’s revelatory protagonist, Jess, is fourteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family and left their Montgomery home to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, waffle house, and gas station along the way. As Jess’s belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family.

Using deadpan humor and savage charm belying deep empathy for her characters, Miller’s debut captures the angst, sexual rivalry, and escalating self-doubt of teenage life in America while announcing Miller as a fierce new voice

When Papa LaBas (private eye, noonday HooDoo, and hero of Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) comes to Berkeley, California, to investigate the mysterious death of Ed Yellings, owner of the Solid Gumbo Works, he finds himself fighting the rising tide of violence propagated by Louisiana Red and those militant opportunists, the Moochers.

A HooDoo detective story and a comprehensive satire on the explosive politics of the '60s, The Last Days of Louisiana Red exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary American culture and race politics.

One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars.

Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

Thirty-seven years old, freshly broken up with his girlfriend, unemployed and vaguely depressed, Hermann has problems of his own. Now, his mother, who is rambunctious, rapier-tongued, frequently intoxicated and, until now impervious to change, has cancer. The doctor's prognosis sounds pretty final, but after a bit of online research, Hermann decides to accompany his mother to an unconventional treatment center in the Netherlands.

Mother and son set out on their trip to Amsterdam, embarking on a schnapps-and-pint-fuelled picaresque that is by turns wickedly funny, tragic, and profound. Although the mother's final destination is never really in doubt, the trip presents the duo with a chance to reevaluate life — beginning, middle and end. Although the trip is lively and entertaining, it will also put severe strain on the bond between mother and son, not to mention their mutual capacity for alcohol.

A thriller of war that never was—of survival in an impossible city—of surreal cataclysm. In The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville entwines true historical events and people with his daring, uniquely imaginative brand of fiction, reconfiguring history and art into something new.

“Beauty will be convulsive…”

1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseilles, American engineer—and occult disciple—Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including Surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

1950. A lone surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts—and by the forces of hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.

But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties—to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both authors will definitely notice some striking similarities between Light of Other Days and other recent works by the two, specifically Baxter’s Manifold: Time and Clarke’s The Trigger.

The Light of Other Days follows a soulless tech billionaire (sort of an older, more crotchety Bill Gates), a soulful muckraking journalist, and the billionaire’s two (separated since birth) sons. It’s 2035, and all four hold ringside seats at the birth of a new paradigm-destroying technology, a system of "WormCams," harnessing the power of wormholes to see absolutely anyone or anything, anywhere, at any distance (even light years away). As if that weren’t enough, the sons eventually figure out how to exploit a time-dilation effect, allowing them to use the holes to peer back in time.

For Baxter’s part, the Light of Other Days develops another aspect of Manifold’s notion that humanity might have to master the flow of time itself to avert a comparatively mundane disaster (yet another yawn-inducing big rock threatening to hit the earth); Clarke, just as he did with Trigger’s anti-gun ray, speculates on how a revolutionary technology can change the world forever.

When Evangeline Stone wakes up naked and bruised on a cold slab at the morgue — in a stranger’s body, with no memory of who she is and how she got there — her troubles are only just beginning. Before that night she and the two other members of her Triad were the city’s star bounty hunters, mercilessly cleansing the city of the murderous creatures living in the shadows, from vampires to shape-shifters to trolls. Then something terrible happened that not only cost all three of them their lives but also convinced the city’s other Hunters that Evy was a traitor — and she can’t even remember what it was.

Now she’s a fugitive, piecing together her memory, trying to deal some serious justice — and discovering that she has only three days to solve her own murder before the reincarnation spell wears off. Because in three days Evy will die again — but this time there’s no second chance…

John Wells has only twelve days to stop the United States from being tricked into invading Iran in the new cutting-edge novel of modern suspense from the #1 New York Times—bestselling author.

Twelve days.

Wells, with his former CIA bosses Ellis Shafer and Vinnie Duto, has uncovered a staggering plot, a false-flag operation to convince the President to attack Iran. But they have no hard evidence, and no one at Langley or the White House will listen.

Now the President has set a deadline for Iran to give up its nuclear program, and the mullahs in Tehran — furious and frightened — have responded with a deadly terrorist attack. Wells, Shafer, and Duto know they have only twelve days to find the proof they need. They fan out, from Switzerland to Saudi Arabia, Israel to Russia, desperately trying to tease out the clues in their possession. Meanwhile, the United States is moving soldiers and Marines to Iran’s border. And Iran has mobilized its own squad of suicide bombers.

And as the days tick by and the obstacles mount, they realize that everything they do may not be enough…

Christmas has always been a sad time for young widow Holly Brown, so when she's asked to look after a remote house on the Lancashire moors, the opportunity to hide herself away is irresistible — the perfect excuse to forget about the festivities. Sculptor, Jude Martland, is determined that this year there will be no Christmas after his brother runs off with his fiancee and he is keen to avoid the family home. However, he will have to return by the twelfth night of the festivities, when the hamlet of Little Mumming hold their historic festivities and all of his family are required to attend. Meanwhile, Holly is finding that if she wants to avoid Christmas, she has come to the wrong place. When Jude unexpectedly returns on Christmas Eve he is far from delighted to discover that Holly seems to be holding the very family party he had hoped to avoid. Suddenly, the blizzards come out of nowhere and the whole village is snowed in. With no escape, Holly and Jude get much more than they bargained for — it looks like the twelve days of Christmas are going to be very interesting indeed!

В сборник включены психологический детектив Эллен Макклой, классический «гангстерский» детектив Дональда Уэстлейка, а также повесть Джона Д. Макдональда, в центре внимания которой — судьба девушки, попавшей в преступную шайку.