"Rodrigo de Souza Leão is an exceptional author and has had a major impact on contemporary Brazilian literature." — Paulo Scott

All Dogs are Blue is a scurrilously funny tale of life in a Rio insane asylum. Its raw style and comic inventiveness signal a major voice in Brazilian literature. Sadly the author died, aged forty-three, soon after it was published in 2008.

Due to his mental fragility, Rodrigo de Souza Leão rarely left his house and yet, through social media, blogging, and e-mail, he became close to many Brazilian writers and poets and remains highly regarded today.

Losing her son in a lorry accident, a woman abandons her lover and her life on the Mexican border and becomes a domestic servant in Madrid; following an awkward ménage-à-trois, a timber agent is blackmailed into introducing his lover's boyfriend to his best client; a depressed, misfit French teacher rejects the overtures of students and would-be lovers; all the while sharp-eyed young Araceli watches over everything from her decrepit apartment.

Nesting stories within stories, setting Bret Easton Ellis among his fellow mutts and enigmatic, love-hungry, dying Alba Cambó among her several lovers, Lina Wolff can really throw her readers a sucker punch.

Upstairs/downstairs distinctions blur as Wolff's adroit and subtle novel turns the tables, allowing servants and subordinates to dominate their masters. With a Bolaño-esque humor Wolff asks, what chance does love have in this dog-eat-dog world?

Tomcat Joe Grey suspects foul play when he spies the severed brake line under a wrecked car and sets out with fetching fellow feline Dulcie to lead the police to the killer.

"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief.

The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions.

“Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio.”

Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes.

“While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach.”

Here is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in original and indelible ways.

"A huge, jagged patchof light forms at the foot of my bed. Then a shape presses through. I'm too horrified to scream. It's a monster from my very worst nightmare - pale red skin; dark red eyes; no nose; and sharp, grey teeth. As it leans further forward I see a hole in the left side of its chest, and inside - dozens of tiny, hissing snakes. The monster frowns andstretches a hand towards me!"

When Kernel Fleck's brother is stolen by demons, he must enter their universe in search of him. It is a place of magic, chaos and incredible danger. Kernel has three aims: learn to use magic, find his brother,and stay alive. But a heartless demon awaits him, and death has been foretold!

2005: In the midst of a cold Montreal winter, a Cambodian woman, known only to us as 'Janie', separates from her husband and son. She takes refuge in the apartment of her friend, the neurologist Hiroji Matsui, but one day he leaves the Brain Research Centre where they are both employed and disappears into the night…

We journey back thirty years from the moment of his vanishing to Janie as a young girl in Phnom Penh, where Cambodia is ruled by the brutal Khmer Rouge. People are seized in the night, families are torn apart, and hunger is everywhere. Helped by a defector, Janie escapes by sea, and arrives in Canada as a refugee. In Montreal, she meets Hiroji — whose brother James, a Red Cross doctor, disappeared in Cambodia in 1975 — and who, like Janie, is haunted by the many lives we carry within ourselves, and the unwieldy shards of history that we make efforts to displace, but fail to extinguish.

Weaving together these fragments in clean, luminous prose, Dogs at the Perimeter is a remarkable, unparalleled map of the mind's battle with memory, loss, and the unspeakable horrors of war.

Dogs of War: Robots are no longer science fiction. Autonomous, programmed to react like animals: fast, relentless, deadly. From microscopic nanobots to massive self-guided aircraft. This technology is here, it’s assessable, and it’s dangerous. What’s even scarier is that almost anyone can get their hands on it.

A freelance terrorist uses the latest generation of robot dogs to deliver WMDs into cities across America. Sophisticated military weapons systems turn on their human masters. A technological apocalypse is coming and we may be too late to stop it.

Joe Ledger and a newly rebuilt Department of Military Sciences square off against this new and terrible threat. *Dogs of War* pits Joe against a merciless new enemy and an army of techno-terrorists in a race to prevent a global destruction.

Let loose the Dogs of War.

Less complex than such recent novels as Manta's Gift and Angelmass, this start to a new SF adventure series from Hugo Award-winner Zahn will appeal largely to younger readers. Fourteen-year-old orphan Jack Morgan, former small-time thief, is on the run, framed for theft from megacorporation Braxton Universis. Hiding out on an unoccupied planet, his only companion an artificial intelligence programmed with the personality of his con man uncle Virge, Jack witnesses a battle between incoming spaceships. While looking over the wreckage, he meets Draycos, a dragon-like K'da, sole survivor of an advance team of K'da and their Shontine allies-murdered by their enemies, the Valahgua, with a terrible energy weapon called "the Death." With Valahgua-backed mercenaries searching the planet for survivors, Jack and Draycos work together to escape. Despite Virge's continuing doubts, Jack agrees to help Draycos find out who betrayed his people; but first they must prove Jack's innocence and get the police off his back. Along the way, each will earn the other's trust as they learn to work together as a team. Zahn keeps the story moving at a breakneck pace, maintaining excitement even when the plot becomes cliched. –From Publishers Weekly

Hands in his pockets, Rebus turned to face Cafferty.

They were old men now, similar builds, similar backgrounds. Sat together in a pub, the casual onlooker might mistake them for pals who'd known one another since school.

But their history told a different story.

Retirement doesn't suit John Rebus. He wasn't made for hobbies, holidays or home improvements. Being a cop is in his blood.

So when DI Siobhan Clarke asks for his help on a case, Rebus doesn't need long to consider his options.

Clarke's been investigating the death of a senior lawyer whose body was found along with a threatening note. On the other side of Edinburgh, Big Ger Cafferty — Rebus's long-time nemesis — has received an identical note and a bullet through his window.

Now it's up to Clarke and Rebus to connect the dots and stop a killer.

Meanwhile, DI Malcolm Fox joins forces with a covert team from Glasgow who are tailing a notorious crime family. There's something they want, and they'll stop at nothing to get it.

It's a game of dog eat dog — in the city, as in the wild.

On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they're dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they're in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend's body is taken away, examined, investigated, and cremated.All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body and futiley searches for his other friends to share the news of Robert's death; Laura, Robert's daughter, who stumbles into the junky's life when she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own place for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others. Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives.Intense, exhilarating, and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society-littered with love, loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption.

An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.

— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.

— I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals — any animal you like — would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.

And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.

André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.

In small-town suburban Australia, three young men from three different ethnic backgrounds — one Samoan, one Macedonian, one not sure — are ready to make their mark. Solomon is all charisma, authority, and charm, a failed basketball player down for the moment but surely not out. His half-brother, Jimmy, bounces along in his wake, underestimated, waiting for his chance to announce himself. Aleks, their childhood friend, loves his mates, his family, and his homeland and would do anything for them. The question is, does he know where to draw the line?

Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks are way out on the fringe of Australia, looking for a way in. Hip hop, basketball, and graffiti give them a voice. Booze, women, and violence pass the time while they wait for their chance. Under the oppressive summer sun, their town has turned tinder-dry. All it’ll take is a spark.

As the surrounding hills roar with flames, the change storms in. But it’s not what they were waiting for. It never is.

The Pentagon has a dirty, little secret they've been keeping quiet for forty years. During the Cold War, a number of live H-bombs were jettisoned and lost around the country as a result of mishaps and mid-air collisions.

A disgraced former Pentagon weapons expert, Howie Collyer, who blew the whistle on the unrecovered H-bombs and lost his job as a result, learns from a nurse in a VA hospital that one of her patients has vague recollections of being the pilot on a B-52 plane that jettisoned a nuke. Collyer teams up with the nurse to kidnap the man from the hospital in the hopes he will lead them to it. When the Pentagon learns Collyer is after the bomb, they try to stop him. But they are not alone. An al-Qaeda sleeper cell that has been keeping an eye on Collyer goes into action.

A mad scramble ensues with the Pentagon, al-Qaeda, and Collyer all after the nuke. Will the al-Qaeda find it first and immolate half the Eastern Seaboard? Will the Pentagon succeed in putting a lid on their secret? Or will Howie Collyer expose the mess and vindicate himself?

Inspired and written under the guidance of master storyteller, John Grisham, the plot of Sleeping Dogs takes amazing twists and turns before ending in an unexpected and spellbinding climax.

On a rainy October night, Louisa waits in the car while her friend Bob makes a dash into the grocery store. Soon he comes out again but with him is a woman in a sleek red suit. She leads him to her Mercedes and they drive away.

Has Louisa been ditched, or has Bob been kidnapped? She enlists the help of her cousin Kay, owner of an antique store, and two intrepid canines, Jack and Emily Ann, to follow the scant clues to find Bob. Find him they do but when they learn who he really is, they find out that the stakes are high. Will they avoid being the next victims of a cold-blooded murderer?

Sleeping dogs lie is author Sharon Henegar's first mystery in the Willow Falls series.

Ray Aldridge, one of the most inventive new writers in SF, offers his longest and strongest story to date, about in abandoned resort planet controlled by ghostly machines and a young woman who falls into the hands of a steel huntsman and his dogs.

Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1989 September

[The Expanse #6.5]: The story takes place between Babylon's Ashes and Persepolis Rising.

Like many before them, Cara and her family ventured through the gates as scientists and researchers, driven to carve out a new life and uncover the endless possibilities of the unexplored alien worlds now within reach.

But soon the soldiers followed and under this new order Cara makes a discovery that will change everything.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany.

The country is holding its breath.

Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger finds her life changed when she unearths a single object from the snow. It is The Grave Digger’s Handbook, left there by accident at her brother’s funeral, and it is her first act of book thievery.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel’s foster family hides a Jewish man in their basement, Liesel’s world is both opened up and closed down.

In superbly crafted prose that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

in which our narrator introduces:

himself—the colors—and the book thief

featuring:

himmel street—the art of saumensching—an ironfisted

woman—a kiss attempt—jesse owens—

sandpaper—the smell of friendship—a heavyweight

champion—and the mother of all watschens

featuring:

a girl made of darkness—the joy of cigarettes

—a town walker—some dead letters—hitler’s birthday—

100 percent pure german sweat—the gates of thievery—

and a book of fire

featuring:

the way home—a broken woman—a struggler—

a juggler—the attributes of summer—

an aryan shopkeeper—a snorer—two tricksters—

and revenge in the shape of mixed candy

featuring:

the accordionist—a promise keeper—a good girl—

a jewish fist fighter—the wrath of rosa—a lecture—

a sleeper—the swapping of nightmares—

and some pages from the basement

featuring:

a floating book—the gamblers—a small ghost—

two haircuts—rudy’s youth—losers and sketches—

a whistler and some shoes—three acts of stupidity—

and a frightened boy with frozen legs

featuring:

death’s diary—the snowman—thirteen

presents—the next book—the nightmare of

a jewish corpse—a newspaper sky—a visitor—

a schmunzeler—and a final kiss on poisoned cheeks

featuring:

champagne and accordions—

a trilogy—some sirens—a sky

stealer—an offer—the long

walk to dachau—peace—

an idiot and some coat men

featuring:

dominoes and darkness—the thought of

rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s

wife—a collector—the bread eaters—

a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—

and the anarchist’s suit collection

featuring:

the next temptation—a cardplayer—

the snows of stalingrad—an ageless

brother—an accident—the bitter taste

of questions—a toolbox, a bleeder,

a bear—a broken plane—

and a homecoming

featuring:

the end of a world—the ninety-eighth day—

a war maker—way of the words—a catatonic girl—

confessions—ilsa hermann’s little black book—

some rib-cage planes—and a mountain range of rubble

featuring:

death and liesel—some

wooden tears—max—

and the handover man

HAS ENGLAND'S MOST INFAMOUS BRIDE THIEF FINALLY MET HIS MATCH?

At six-and-twenty, Samantha Briggeham knew her marital prospects were fading by the season and she was pleased by the thought. She had no intention of being betrothed-especially against her will-to a man she did not love. She had a plan…and it didn't include being swept into a pair of powerful arms and spirited away by a masked rider. News of Sammie's heroic rescue from undesired wedlock turned her into the toast of the ton, wooed by suitors far and wide. But she couldn't forget the swashbuckling brigand who'd abducted her-something about him intrigued her completely. Then she met Eric Landsdowne, the dashing and seductive Earl of Wesley.

His exploits were legendary, his life filled with danger. He was the elusive Bride Thief, who had his own reasons for helping young women escape the unhappy fate of arranged marriages, and whose true identity was a scrupulously guarded secret. But from the moment he rescued Sammie-only to discover she'd already managed to get herself un-betrothed-Eric knew he couldn't lose her a second time. Marriage was out of the question. Which left only one option: A clandestine affair that might lead to scandal, social ruin, and the unmasking of a love-bested legend…

Peter is quick, daring, and full of mischief—and like all boys, he loves to play, though his games often end in blood. His eyes are sparkling gold, and when he graces you with his smile you are his friend for life, but his promised land is not Neverland.

Fourteen-year-old Nick would have been murdered by the drug dealers preying on his family had Peter not saved him. Now the irresistibly charismatic wild boy wants Nick to follow him to a secret place of great adventure, where magic is alive and you never grow old. Even though he is wary of Peter's crazy talk of faeries and monsters, Nick agrees. After all, New York City is no longer safe for him, and what more could he possibly lose?

There is always more to lose.

In a small New England town, a divorced college professor named Alex Bauer finds an abandoned pup, takes it into his home and grows to love it — unaware that at an experimental canine development installation a hundred miles away a very specially bred pup is missing.

Then one day the dog revert to his primal nature…

Winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction

The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.

Second in the Kurt Wallander series.On the Swedish coastline, two bodies, victims of grisly torture and cold execution, are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, and no crime scene, Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain he has the ability to solve a case as mysterious as it is heinous. But after the victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, a country gripped by the upheaval of Soviet disintegration, Major Liepa of the Riga police takes over the investigation. Thinking his work done, Wallander slips into routine once more, until suddenly, he is called to Riga and plunged into an alien world where shadows are everywhere, everything is watched, and old regimes will do anything to stay alive.

In a remote corner of Zangaro, a small republic in Africa, lies Crystal Mountain. At certain times of the day the mountain emits a strange glow. Only Sir James Manson knows why. The mountain contains ten billion dollar's worth of the world's most valuable mineral, platinum. "Not only exciting but truly surprising"--Atlantic. Now the only question is, how to get hold of it. Sir James knows how. Invade the country with a band of savage, cold-blooded mercenaries. Topple the government and set up a puppet dictatorship. Unleash the dogs of war.

Ray and his best friend, Manny, close ever since they met in juvie almost twenty years ago, have a great scam going: With a couple of fake badges and some DEA windbreakers they found at a secondhand store, they pose as federal agents and rip off small-time drug dealers, taking their money and drugs and disappearing before anyone is the wiser. It’s the perfect sting: the dealers they target are too small to look for revenge and too guilty to call the police, nobody has to die, nobody innocent gets hurt, and Ray and Manny score plenty.

But it can’t last forever. Eventually, they choose the wrong mark and walk out with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a heavy hitter, who is more than willing to kill to get his money back, is coming after them. Now Ray couldn’t care less about the score. He wants out--out of the scam, out of a life he feels like he never chose. Whether the victim of his latest job--not to mention his partner--will let him is another question entirely.

Dennis Tafoya brings a rich, passionate, and accomplished new voice to the explosive story of a small-time crook with everything to lose in Dope Thief, his outstanding hardboiled debut.

In the remote hills of northern England lives a powerful clan with a centuries-old secret. They are the drákon, shape-shifters who possess the ability to Turn-changing from human to smoke to dragon. And from the very stones of the earth, they hear hypnotic songs of beauty and wonder. But there is one stone they fear…

Buried deep within the bowels of the Carpathian Mountains lies the legendary dreaming diamond known as Draumr, the only gem with the power to enslave the drákon. Since childhood, Lady Amalia Langford, daughter of the clan's Alpha, has heard its haunting ballad but kept it secret, along with another rare Gift…

Lia can hear the future, much in the way she hears the call of Draumr. And in that future, she realizes that the diamond-along with the fate of the drákon-rests in the hands of a human man, one who straddles two worlds.

Ruthlessly clever, Zane has risen through London's criminal underworld to become its ruler. Once a street urchin saved by Lia's mother, Zane is also privy to the secrets of the clan-and is the only human they trust to bring them Draumr. But he does nothing selflessly.

Zane's hunt for the gem takes him to Hungary, where he is shocked to encounter a bold, beautiful young noblewoman: Lia. She has broken every rule of the drákon to join him, driven by the urgent song of Draumr-and her visions of Zane. In one future, he is her ally. In another, her overlord. In both, he is her lover. Now, to protect her tribe, Lia must tie her fate to Zane's, to the one man capable of stealing her future-and destroying her heart…

At the height of the hot summer of 1144, a lucky hit by one of King Stephen's archers rids the Fen country of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, who has amassed his castles and gold by robbing rich and poor alike. Thus, the Benedictine abbey at Ramsey, long used as a den for Geoffrey's raggle-taggle marauders, is returned in a thoroughly ruined state to the good brothers of that order. The news comes to Brother Cadfael or the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Shrewsbury in the person of the dour, raw-boned Brother Herluin who is soliciting funds and aid to restore Ramsey Abbey to its former splendor. Of much more interest to Cadfael is Herluin's companion, Brother Tutilo, a slightly built lad with a guileless face surrounded by a profusion of brown curls. But Brother Cadfael, long a shrewd judge of character, notes on that brow an intelligence that bespeaks more of mischief than innocence, and he muses that this Brother Tutilo bears watching. The arrival of a French troubadour, his servant, and a girl with the voice of an angel gives Cadfael a feeling in his wise bones that something is about to happen. It does. The late autumn rains bring flood waters right to the altar where the abbey's most precious possession reposes - the bones of Saint Winifred. Only Brother Cadfael knows that moving the holy relic can expose a long hidden secret. He never envisions that the results of disinterment will be the theft of the cherished bones...and murder. Suspicion quickly falls on a guilty-looking Brother Tutilo. But did he do it?

"Without doubt, The Holy Thief is one of the best historical mysteries I've read in the last ten years." – David Liss

***

Moscow, 1936 and Stalin's Great Terror is beginning. In a deconsecrated Church, a young woman is found dead, her mutilated body displayed on the altar for all to see.

Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev, finally beginning to enjoy the benefits of his success with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia, is asked to investigate. But when he discovers that the victim is an American citizen, the NKVD -the most feared organisation in Russia- becomes involved. Soon, Korolev's every move is under close scrutiny and one false move will mean exile to The Zone, where the enemies of the Soviet State, both real and imagined, meet their fate in the frozen camps of the far north.

Committed to uncovering the truth behind this gruesome murder, Korolev,enters the realm of the Thieves, who run Moscow 's underworld. And as more bodies are discovered and the pressure from above builds, Korolev begins to question who he can trust; and who, in this Russia where fear, uncertainty and hunger prevails, are the real criminals. Soon, Korolev will find not only his moral and political ideals threatened, but also his life…

Percy Jackson is a good kid, but he can't seem to focus on his schoolwork or control his temper. And lately, being away at boarding school is only getting worse — Percy could have sworn his pre-algebra teacher turned into a monster and tried to kill him. When Percy's mom finds out, she knows it's time that he knew the truth about where he came from, and that he go to the one place he'll be safe. She sends Percy to Camp Half Blood, a summer camp for demigods (on Long Island), where he learns that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea. Soon a mystery unfolds and together with his friends — one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena — Percy sets out on a quest across the United States to reach the gates of the Underworld (located in a recording studio in Hollywood) and prevent a catastrophic war between the gods.

Expanding on his Sports Illustrated cover story, Gorant (Fanatic) offers a chilling investigation into Michael Vick' s dog-fighting operation and the men and women who brought him to justice and rehabilitated the rescued dogs. Gorant outlines the rise of Bad Newz Kennels, describing in sometimes painful detail the abuse, torture, and execution of the animals-particularly disturbing is an episode in which Vick and a friend swing a failed fighting dog over their heads like a jump rope and kill it by repeatedly slamming it into the ground-and tracing the rescue of dozens of pit bulls seized from Vick' s property. Gorant outlines the efforts to save these animals from euthanasia, challenging the negative public perceptions of pit bulls and reporting back on the status of dogs like Sox (now a certified therapy dog), Zippy (adopted by a family of five), and Iggy (still shy but growing comfortable with his adopted circle of friends). At a time when Vick has returned to professional football and much of the public outcry about Bad Newz Kennels has been forgotten, this book provides a stark reminder about the horror and prevalence of dog fighting.

A gripping novel about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940.

In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura brings a noir sensibility to one of the most fascinating and complex political narratives of the past hundred years: the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Ramón Mercader.

The story revolves around Iván Cárdenas Maturell, who in his youth was the great hope of modern Cuban literature-until he dared to write a story that was deemed counterrevolutionary. When we meet him years later in Havana, Iván is a loser: a humbled and defeated man with a quiet, unremarkable life who earns his modest living as a proofreader at a veterinary magazine. One afternoon, he meets a mysterious foreigner in the company of two Russian wolfhounds. This is "the man who loved dogs," and as the pair grow closer, Iván begins to understand that his new friend is hiding a terrible secret.

Moving seamlessly between Iván's life in Cuba, Ramón's early years in Spain and France, and Trotsky's long years of exile, The Man Who Loved Dogs is Padura's most ambitious and brilliantly executed novel yet. This is a story about political ideals tested and characters broken, a multilayered epic that effortlessly weaves together three different plot threads- Trotsky in exile, Ramón in pursuit, Iván in frustrated stasis-to bring emotional truth to historical fact.

A novel whose reach is matched only by its astonishing successes on the page, The Man Who Loved Dogs lays bare the human cost of abstract ideals and the insidious, corrosive effects of life under a repressive political regime.

The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination — was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing? — the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however — a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose — has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten. .

Meanwhile, in two other Venices — Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today — two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret. .

All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down — an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice. . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

Two worlds collide when a mermaid and human man meet, plunging readers into a vast underwater realm brimming with adventure and intrigue.

The mermaid's scales were bronze, and they shimmered like hundreds of pennies arranged close together. Her immense blue-green eyes gave a look of fragility to her face, yet he found her eyes unsettling. She was leaning against a thirty-foot-long shark, which emerged from behind her and opened its mouth to reveal a great big cavern lined with hundreds of teeth—a black tunnel ready to swallow him.

Coralline is a mermaid who is engaged to the merman of her dreams. But when an oil spill wreaks havoc on her idyllic village life, her little brother falls gravely ill. Desperate to save him, she embarks on aquest to find a legendary elixir made of starlight.

Izar, a human man, is on the cusp of an invention that will enable him to mine the depths of the ocean. His discovery will soon make him the richest man on earth—while threatening merpeople with extinction.But then, suddenly, Izar finds himself transformedinto a merman and caught in a web of betrayal and intrigue. Meeting Coralline in the ocean, he decides to join her on her quest for the elixir, hoping it will turn him human again.

The quest pushes Coralline and Izar together, even though their worlds are at odds. Their pasts threaten to tear them apart, while a growing attraction adds to the danger. Ultimately, each of them faces an impossiblechoice. Should Coralline leave her fiancé for a manwho might betray her? And Izar has a dark secret of his own—one that could cause him to lose Coralline forever.

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy – from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to steal their thoughts, to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars. Except that Jean made one mistake. Now he is condemned to play endless variations of a game-theoretic riddle in the vast virtual jail of the Axelrod Archons – the Dilemma Prison – against countless copies of himself. Jean's routine of death, defection and cooperation is upset by the arrival of Mieli and her spidership, Perhonen. She offers him a chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self – in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed… The Quantum Thief is a dazzling hard SF novel set in the solar system of the far future – a heist novel peopled by bizarre post-humans but powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

For centuries they've lived in secret among northern England's green and misted hills. Creatures of extraordinary beauty, power, and sensuality, they possess the ability to shape-shift from human to dragon and back again. Now their secret-and their survival-is threatened by a temptation that will break every boundary.

Dubbed the Smoke Thief, a daring jewel thief is confounding the London police. His wealthy victims claim the master burglar can walk through walls and vanish into thin air. But Christoff, the charismatic Marquess of Langford, knows the truth: the thief is no ordinary human but a "runner" who's fled Darkfrith without

permission. As Alpha leader of the dra´kon, it's Kit's duty to capture the fugitive before the secrets of the tribe are revealed to mortals. But not even Kit suspects that the Smoke Thief could be a woman.

Clarissa Rue Hawthorne knew her dangerous exploits would attract the attention of the dra´kon. But she didn't expect Christoff himself to come to London, dangling the tribe's most valuable jewel-the Langford Diamond-as bait. For as long as she could rememb

er, Rue had lived the life of a halfling-half dra´kon, half mortal-and an outcast in both worlds. She'd always loved the handsome and willful Kit from the only place it was safe: from afar. But now she was no longer the shy, timid girl she'd once been. She was the first woman capable of making the Turn in four generations. So why did she still feel the same dizzying sense of vulnerability whenever he was near?

From the moment he saw her, Kit knew that the alluring and powerful beauty was every bit his Alpha equal and destined to be his bride. And by the harsh laws of the dra´kon, Rue knew that she was the property of the marquess. But they will risk banishment and worse for a chance at something greater. For now Rue is his prisoner, the diamond has disappeared, and she's made the kind of dangerous proposition a man like Kit cannot resist.

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes.

Stealing things from people who had upset her was something Polly did quite a lot. There was her Aunt Pauline; a girl at school; a boyfriend who left her; and there was the man on the plane…Humiliated and scared, by a total stranger, Polly does what she always does. She steals something. But she never could have imagined that her desire for revenge would have such terrifying results.

Once upon a time, two girls from opposite corners of the globe collide in a deceptively sleepy town in the deep south. Their unlikely friendship becomes the catalyst that unravels Havenwood's most closely guarded secrets, and will change their lives forever.

Jul Graham doesn't know what to expect when she's sent to live with her grandmother after her father's abrupt disappearance, but it certainly isn't a private school full of foreign students and a magic mirror in her backyard. Her new best friend is a blonde girl who speaks Japanese, and all of the adults - including her grandmother - treat Jul like she's some sort of time bomb. On top of that, she's a subject of interest to her new classmates, who don't seem entirely normal themselves. What is Havenwood hiding?

Naguib Mahfouz is Egypt's most famous novelist and his leading role in Arabic literature remains assured. He is now the author of no fewer than thirty novels and more than a hundred short stories; in Egypt each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf. If only because of his impact on the Arab world, Mahfouz must be considered an author of international importance.

"This is a psychological novel, impressionist rather than realist; it moves with the speed and economy of a detective story. Here Mahfouz uses the "stream of consciousness" technique for the first time to show the mental anguish of the central figure consumed by bitterness and a desire for revenge against the individuals and the society who have corrupted and betrayed him and brought about his inevitable damnation. It is a masterly work, swiftly giving the reader a keenly accurate vision of the workings of a sick and embittered mind doomed to self-destruction."

From the Introduction by Trevor Le Gassick

From Library Journal

Block introduced Evan Tanner, specialist in lost political causes, in this rousing, often comic 1966 yarn. Unable to sleep for 15 years following a Korean War head wound, Tanner devotes his considerable free time to reading, learning languages, and turning his affliction into a livelihood by writing theses and dissertations for graduate students in New York. Then he learns of hidden Armenian gold in Turkey and sets off on an unlikely adventure that makes him the most wanted fugitive in the world as well as the accidental leader of a Macedonian revolt. Block's tale gets off to an engaging start, sags in the middle partly because of some bone-jarring violence, and recovers neatly at the end. Nick Sullivan handles the characters' many accents quite well. Highly recommended.

Jack didn’t know what to call the nameless, skeletal creature that slunk into her house in the dead of night, stealing the very things she loved the most. So she named him The Toy Thief…

There’s something in Jack’s past that she doesn’t want to face, an evil presence that forever changed the trajectory of her family. It all began when The Toy Thief appeared, a being drawn by goodness and innocence, eager to feed on everything Jack holds dear.

What began as a mystery spirals out of control when her brother, Andy, is taken away in the night, and Jack must venture into the dark place where the toys go to get him back. But even if she finds him, will he ever be the same?

After her mother mysteriously disappears, sixteen-year-old Haley convinces her father to take her to Iceland, where her mother was last seen. There, amidst the ancient fissures and crevices of that volcanic island, Haley meets gorgeous Ari, a boy with a dangerous side who appoints himself her protector.

When Haley picks up a silver coin that entangles her in a spell cast by her ancestor Hallgerd, she discovers that Hallgerd's spell and her mother's disappearance are connected to a chain of events that could unleash terrifying powers and consume the world. Haley must find a way to contain the growing fires of the spell—and her growing attraction to Ari.

Janni Lee Simner brings the fierce romance and violent passions of Iceland's medieval sagas into this twenty-first-century novel, with spellbinding results.

He was a gentleman bandit, she was a cat burglar. And they caught each other in more ways than one. But their desire was as strong as their distrust, and Jordan Tavistock began to fear that Diana Lamb was more than just a thief of hearts.

Magiere the dhampir thinks that her nights of hunting vampires are over. After settling down in her newly adopted village of Miiska-now vampire-free thanks to her and her half-elf partner, Leesil-she looks forward to quiet days tending to her tavern.

But far away in the capital city of Bela, a prominent councilman's daughter has been found dead on her own doorstep… and all signs point to a vampire. Knowing that the battered and burned village of Miiska could use an infusion of cash, Bela's town council offers a generous bounty to the dhampir if she will slay their vampire. Magiere resists, wanting nothing more than to forget her past and ignore her half-vampire nature. Only Leesil can persuade Magiere to follow her destiny-before more innocents are claimed by darkness.

The shattering sequel to the acclaimed Scorpion Shards.

For five young people born with extraordinary powers, a climatic battle against Evil seemingly brought an end to their nightmare. But as they will discover, the nightmare has only began.

Imprisoned for thousands of years, an ancient, malevolent force—The Bringer—awaits the moment when it can break free and wreak its revenge upon the world. Only one force can stop it: the power of the five.

— “Neal Shusterman dazzles you with action and excites you with ideas, but underneath it all, his stories are unforgettable because his characters have souls.” — Orson Scott Card

‘People have been messing around with time ever since there were people. Wasting it, killing it, sparing it, making it up. People’s heads were made to play with time.’

But time isn’t a toy to be played with. It’s bigger than all of us. It exists outside the artificial and arbitrary divisions into which humankind has presumptuously shoehorned it. It needs to be elastic.

To understand truly, you have to see time as the most important resource we have. You mess with it at your peril. You can let it move fast or slowly but what you mustn’t do is allow it to stop. Because when time stands still, everything stops with it. Then, there really is no future. And where would we be without one of those?

Annotations collected and edited by Leo Breebaart. http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/thief-of-time.html

Michael Kandel occasionally translates science fiction from Polish (Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad), occasionally acquires science fiction for Harcourt Brace and Company (Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden), and occasionally writes his own science fiction (Panda Ray, St. Martin’s Press). He works as an editor at the Modern Language Association.

Amazon.com Review

"Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?" A good question, especially when the suicide victim is Pasha Ivanov, a Moscow physicist-turned-billionaire businessman-a "New Russian" poster boy, if ever there was one-with several homes, a leggy 20-year-old girlfriend ("the kind [of blonde] who could summon the attention of a breeze"), and every reason to be contented in his middle age. So, wonders Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, in Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, what provoked Ivanov to take a header from his stylish 10th-floor apartment? And how does it relate to the shaker clutched in his dead hand or the hillock of table salt found on his closet floor?

Renko, introduced in Smith's 1981 bestseller, Gorky Park, is a cop well out of sync with rapidly changing Russian society, "a difficult investigator, a holdover from the Soviet era, a man on the skids" whose determination to do more than go through the motions of criminal inquiries inevitably exasperates his superiors. Thus, when this saturnine detective declines to accept the verdict that Ivanov did himself in-who peppered that salt around the capitalist's premises, Renko still wants to know, and what about rumors of a security breach at Ivanov's apartment building?-he is exiled to the Ukrainian Zone of Exclusion, the "radioactive wasteland" surrounding Chernobyl, site of a notorious 1986 nuclear disaster and the place where, only a week after Ivanov's demise, his company's senior vice-president is found with his throat slit. There, among cynical scientists, entrepreneurial scavengers, and predators both two- and four-legged-an exclusive coterie of the rejected-Renko chews over the crimes on his plate. Unfortunately, the dosimeter that warns him of radiation exposure at Chernobyl does not also protect him from a pair of malevolent brothers, or a "damaged" woman doctor offering him mutually assured disappointment.

Smith has a keen eye for the comical quirks of modern-day Russia -its chaotic roadways, voracious appetite for post-communist luxuries, and evolving ethics ("Russians used to kill for women or power, real reasons. Now they kill for money"). And this story's bleakly beautiful Ukrainian backdrop nicely complements the desperate hope of Renko's task. Still, the greatest strength of Wolves Eat Dogs (Smith's fifth series installment, after Havana Bay) is its characters, especially Arkady Renko, who despite his lugubrious nature continues to show a heart as expansive and unfathomable as the Siberia steppe.

From Publishers Weekly

Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past-including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star-but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl. Renko is called in to investigate the 10-story, plunge-to-the-pavement death of Pasha Ivanov, fabulously wealthy president of Moscow 's NoviRus corporation, whose death is declared a suicide by Renko's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. Renko, being Renko, isn't sure it's suicide and wonders about little details like the bloody handprints on the windowsill and the curious matter of the closet filled with 50 kilos of salt. And why is NoviRus's senior vice-president Lev Timofeyev's nose bleeding? Renko asks too many questions, so an annoyed Zurin sends him off to Chernobyl to investigate when Timofeyev turns up in the cemetery in a small Ukrainian town with his throat slit and his face chewed on by wolves. The cemetery lies within the dangerously radioactive 30-kilometer circle called the Zone of Exclusion, populated by a contingent of scientists, a detachment of soldiers and those-the elderly, the crooks, the demented-who have sneaked back to live in abandoned houses and apartments. The secret of Ivanov and Timofeyev's deaths lies somewhere in the Zone, and the dogged Renko, surrounded by wolves both animal and human, refuses to leave until he unravels the mystery. It's the Zone itself and the story of Chernobyl that supplies the riveting backbone of this novel. Renko races around the countryside on his Uralmoto motorcycle, listening always to the ominous ticking of his dosimeter as it counts the dangerous levels of radioactivity present in the food, the soil, the air and the people themselves as they lie, cheat, love, steal, kill and die.