Hailed as 'luminous' by The New York Times Book Review, Nicole Mones' bestselling debut novel, Lost in Translation, dazzled critics with a sensuous tale of adventure and awakening set in modern China.

A Cup of Light returns to that rich, exotic landscape in an enthralling saga of precious works of art-and the human lives illuminated by them. Written with exquisite grace, A Cup of Light is an intoxicating blend of romance and intrigue, complete with a heroine whose voice is irresistible to the last page.

As an appraiser of fine Chinese porcelain, Lia Frank holds fragile beauty in her hands, examines priceless treasure with a magnifying lens. But when Lia looks in the mirror, she sees the flaws in herself, a woman wary of love, cut off from the world around her. Still, when she is sent to Beijing to authenticate a collection of rare pieces, Lia will find herself changing in surprising ways…coming alive in the shadow of an astounding mystery…drawn into an unfolding saga of artists and thieves, intrigue and longing.

Lia was told the collection was impressive-twenty spectacular pots. Instead, in a vast room in a gated home in Beijing, Lia finds herself surrounded by the impossible: forty crates and eight hundred works of astounding beauty, with pieces reaching back centuries and perhaps even into the royal residence of the Forbidden City. Now Lia must evaluate each fragile pot, pairing each brushstroke and each nearly invisible imperfection with the database in her mind. Her job is to answer questions that will reverberate through dozens of lives: Where did these works of art come from? Are they truly authentic? Or are they impossibly beautiful forgeries-part of the perilous underworld of Chinese art?

As Lia examines her treasure, a breathtaking mystery unravels around her. A smuggler will risk his life for a chance to spirit these imperial antiquities out of China. A dealer in Hong Kong awaits, while a buyer in America is driven by a longing no possession will ever fulfill. And with political intrigue intruding on her world of provenance and beauty, Lia is drawn into another, more personal drama-a love affair that could alter the course of her life…

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The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism, and the heart-wrenching humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, just fifteen, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring, and finally devastating)… and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his stunted acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq-oMYIS44o

In a scenario terrifyingly close to today's headlines, Harry's debut novel opens with a North Korean invasion of South Korea that leads, through a series of tragic errors and decisions, to a Russian nuclear attack on military bases in the U.S.

Like techno-thriller master Tom Clancy, Harry offers a sprawling narrative that focuses on a small army of soldiers, politicians and their families, American and Russian. National Security Advisor Greg Lambert must keep and tell secrets that may lead to Armageddon; Reservist David Chandler must leave his pregnant wife in order to drive a tank; U.S. President Walter Livingston, eager for peace, must endure the ignominy of impeachment; Russian General Yuri Razov must deal with the consequences of his initial decision to launch nuclear missiles. Ground, air and submarine battles alternate with scenes of anarchy stateside as exhausted leaders are forced to make instant decisions that might snuff out humanity forever. With a masterful grasp of military strategy and geopolitics, Harry moves his characters through nightmares of blood and death; his intricately detailed scenes of nuclear devastation are particularly horrifying. Told through a series of rapid-fire climaxes, this novel, a political and military cautionary tale of considerable power and conviction, will keep readers riveted.

"A heir to Javier Marías. . An outstanding stylistic narrative. A joyful discovery." — J. M. Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

After both their marriages collapse, two old friends take to sharing their life again as they used to. They go out for drinks, have long conversations and, all in all, try to hide way from the world. One day, one of them is stabbed to death in his apartment. His friend will then seek out the truth.

Carlos Castán is considered one of the best short-story writers in Spain. Bad Light is his first novel. He lives in Zaragoza, Spain.

From the New York Times best-selling author Paul Theroux, Blinding Light is a slyly satirical novel of manners and mind expansion. Slade Steadman, a writer who has lost his chops, sets out for the Ecuadorian jungle with his ex-girlfriend in search of inspiration and a rare hallucinogen. The drug, once found, heightens both his powers of perception and his libido, but it also leaves him with an unfortunate side effect: periodic blindness. Unable to resist the insights that enable him to write again, Steadman spends the next year of his life in thrall to his psychedelic muse and his erotic fantasies, with consequences that are both ecstatic and disastrous.

Dean Koontz has surpassed his longtime reputation as "America's most popular suspense novelist"(Rolling Stone) to become one of the most celebrated and successful writers of our time. Reviewers hail his boundless originality, his art, his unparalleled ability to create highly textured, riveting drama, at once viscerally familiar and utterly unique.

Author of one #1 New York Times bestseller after another, Koontz is at the pinnacle of his powers, spinning mysteries and miracles, enthralling tales that speak directly to today's readers, balm for the heart and fire for the mind. In this stunning new novel, he delivers a tour de force of dark suspense and brilliant revelation that has all the Koontz trademarks: adventure, chills, riddles, humor, heartbreak, an unforgettable cast of characters, and a climax that will leave you clamoring for more.

Dylan O'Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He's on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious "doctor," injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him...or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor's enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.

Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life...and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery--and wondrous discovery. It is a journey that begins when Dylan and Shep's path intersects with that of Jillian Jackson. Before that evening Jilly was a beautiful comedian whose biggest worry was whether she would ever find a decent man. Now she too is a carrier. And even as Dylan tries to convince her that they'll be safer sticking together, cold-eyed men in a threatening pack of black Suburbans approach, only seconds before Jilly's classic Coupe DeVille explodes into thin air.

Now the three are on the run together, but with no idea whom they're running from--or why. Meanwhile Shep has begun exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior. And whatever it is that's coursing through their bodies seems to have plunged them into one waking nightmare after another. Seized by sinister premonitions, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to crime scenes--just minutes before the crimes take place.

What this unfathomable power is, how they can use it to stop the evil erupting all around them, and why they have been chosen are only parts of a puzzle that reaches back into the tragic past and the dark secrets they all share: secrets of madness, pain, and untimely death. Perhaps the answer lies in the eerie, enigmatic messages that Shep, with precious time running out, begins to repeat, about an entity who does his work "by the light of the moon."

By the Light of the Moon is a novel of heart-stopping suspense and transcendent beauty, of how evil can destroy us and love can redeem us--a masterwork of the imagination in which the surprises come page after page and the spell of sublime storytelling triumphs throughout.

A searing, indelible love story of two ravaged spirits-a screenwriter and an actress- played out under the merciless, magnifying prism of Hollywood.

Everything is different underground. Just ask the residents of Harmony, a futuristic world where alien catacombs can lead you astray—and where psychic senses spark out-of-this-world passion…

Reporter Sierra McIntyre's stories on Crystal City's ghost hunters—and their mysterious guild—have earned her tabloid a bit of respect. And they've allowed her to clothe her dust bunny companion Elvis in rock-and-roll style. It helps that she has mega-rez intuition to fall back on…

Especially when she interviews Ghost Hunter Guild Boss John Fontana about the disappearances of retired, homeless hunters. She doesn't want to trust the physically and psychically powerful man, but her senses—and Elvis—give her the green light. To uncover the conspiracy within his own organization, Fontana proposes…marriage. And though it's purely a business arrangement, there is nothing pure about the attraction that sizzles between them…

A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle of the forest. But who really is this child? The answer at the secret heart of this novel is both uncanny and profoundly touching. Antonio Moresco's "Little Prince" is a moving meditation on life and the universe we inhabit. Moresco reflects on the solitude and pain of existence, but also on what we share with all around us, living and dead.

Detective Sergeant Logan MacRae has been bumped to D.I. Roberta Steel’s ‘Screw-up Squad’ after a raid he led on a warehouse rumored to be full of stolen property ended with no arrests and one officer critically injured. The backstabbing, limelight-stealing, laziest D.I. on Aberdeen’s police force, Steel’s team is made up of the ‘no-hopers,’ the most worthless or inexperienced members of the homicide department, and Logan will do anything to prove he doesn’t belong there. Including working overtime on two baffling cases: the murder by arson of six people, and the beating to death of a prostitute down by the docks, not a high priority compared to the fire. At least not until another prostitute ends up dead.

Although both cases seem simple on the surface — turns out the fire’s victims are part of a drug dealer’s inner circle, and what fate is to be expected for working girls in Aberdeen’s red-light district? — in Stuart MacBride’s hands, what’s going on in this rainy Scottish city is bound to be much more complicated than it appears. A detailed authenticity combines with a dark Scottish sense of humor and a lively cast of characters in MacBride’s unputdownable second novel, confirming his status as a rising star of crime fiction.

Midwinter, a freezing night in Leith, near Edinburgh's red light district. A policewoman's flashlight stabs the darkness in a snow-covered cemetery. The circle of light stops on a colourless, dead face. So begins the hunt for a serial murderer of prostitutes in Gillian Galbraith's third Alice Rice mystery, "The Dying of the Light". Partly inspired by the real-life killings of prostitutes in Ipswich, this novel explores a hidden world where sex is bartered for money and drugs. Off-duty, Alice's home life continues its uneven course. Her romance with the artist Ian Melville offers the prospect of happiness, but is plagued by insecurity. Her demented but determined neighbour, Miss Spinnell, offers a new challenge to Alice's patience at every meeting. This atmospheric thriller builds on the success of the first two Alice Rice mysteries, "Blood in the Water" and "Where the Shadow Falls", and it is Gillian Galbraith's most accomplished novel yet.

When Magizoologist Newt Scamander arrives in New York, he intends his stay to be just a brief stopover. However, when his magical case is misplaced and some of Newt's fantastic beasts escape, it spells trouble for everyone...

Inspired by the original Hogwart's textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. A feat of imagination and featuring a cast of remarkable characters and magical creatures, this is epic adventure-packed storytelling at its very best. Whether an existing fan or new to the wizarding world, this is a perfect addition for any film lover or reader's bookshelf.

The film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will have its theatrical release on 18th November 2016.

Boggis, Bunce and Bean are the nastiest three farmers you could ever meet. They hate Mr Fox and plan to shoot, starve or dig him out of his hole. But Mr Fox is much cleverer than they are and he has a cunning plan of his own.

Ivy Granger, psychic detective, thought she'd seen it all...until now.

With a vengeful lamia that only she can see on the city streets, reports of specters walking Harborsmouth cemeteries, and an angry mob of faerie clients at her office door, it's bound to be a long night. Add in an offense against the faerie courts and a few foolish bargains and one thing is clear--Ivy Granger is in some seriously deep trouble.

Ivy Granger is back, gathering clues in the darkest shadows of downtown Harborsmouth. With the lives of multiple clients on the line, she's in a race against time. Ivy finally has a lead to the whereabouts of the one person who can help her control her wisp abilities, but will she put the needs of her clients above her own?

If Ivy doesn't find a solution soon, she could wind up a ghost herself.

GHOST LIGHT is the second novel in the bestselling Ivy Granger urban fantasy series by E.J. Stevens.

Tired of dating egomaniacs, interior designer Pamela Gray has nearly given up on men. She wants to be treated like a goddess – preferably by a god. As she whispers her wish, she unwittingly invokes the goddess Artemis, who has some tricks up her celestial sleeve…

Twins Artemis and Apollo have been sent to the Kingdom of Las Vegas to test their mantle. Their first assignment: make Pamela’s wish come true. So Artemis volunteers her golden brother. After all, who better than the handsome God of Light to bring love to this lonely woman?

It might be a first, but here in Sin City, where life is a gamble, both god and mortal are about to bet on a high-stakes game of love. Hey, you only live once. Or do you?

Christmas is approaching, and in Québec it's a time of dazzling snowfalls, bright lights, and gatherings with friends in front of blazing hearths. But shadows are falling on the usually festive season for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department, his old friend and lieutenant Jean-Guy Beauvoir hasn't spoken to him in months, and hostile forces are lining up against him. When Gamache receives a message from Myrna Landers that a longtime friend has failed to arrive for Christmas in the village of Three Pines, he welcomes the chance to get away from the city. Mystified by Myrna's reluctance to reveal her friend's name, Gamache soon discovers the missing woman was once one of the most famous people not just in North America, but in the world, and now goes unrecognized by virtually everyone except the mad, brilliant poet Ruth Zardo.

As events come to a head, Gamache is drawn ever deeper into the world of Three Pines. Increasingly, he is not only investigating the disappearance of Myrna's friend but also seeking a safe place for himself and his still-loyal colleagues. Is there peace to be found even in Three Pines, and at what cost to Gamache and the people he holds dear?

How the Light Gets In is the ninth Chief Inspector Gamache Novel from Louise Penny.

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century.

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.

In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope-from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton-and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world-and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.

In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

From bestselling author Dean Koontz comes an eBook original novella, the first of two tales that pave the way for Ashley Bell, his new novel of dark suspense! A woman with a good heart and a troubling gift. A man with a twisted soul and a terrifying talent. In this literal war of wills, only one can survive.

With just a touch, Makani Hisoka-O’Brien can see the deepest secrets that others conceal — and it frightens her. There’s danger in the terrible knowledge that floods her mind and haunts her conscience.

With just a touch, Rainer Sparks can learn the biggest problems that others bear — and it thrills him. There’s profit to be made making problems go away, by any means… including murder.

In a place as big as Southern California, these two might have never met and discovered one another’s chilling abilities. But good and evil have a way of colliding… with shattering consequences.

Light marks that fine writer M John Harrison's first return to the heartland of SF—including spaceships and hair-raising interstellar chases—since his apocalyptic anti-space opera The Centauri Device (1975).

The heavy SF action begins in 2400. Space-going humanity is the latest of many civilizations to be baffled by the impenetrable Kefahuchi Tract; that vast stellar region where an unshielded singularity makes physics itself unreliable. Along its accessible fringe, the "Beach", solar systems are littered with crazy, abandoned devices used to probe the Tract since before life began on Earth. A whole dead-end culture is based on beachcombing this rubble of industrial archaeology...

25th-century characters include a woman who's sacrificed almost everything to merge with the AI "mathematics" of a crack military spacecraft; a former daredevil who once surfed black holes but has retreated into a virtual reality tank; the lady proprietor of the Circus of Pathet Lao, with an alien freakshow and a hidden agenda; and a variety of raunchy, smelly, gene-sculpted lowlife, some comic, some menacing. Many are not what they seem.

Meanwhile in 1999 London, physicists Kearney and Tate—remembered in 2400 as the fathers of interstellar flight—are getting nowhere. Kearney's personal problems occupy familiar Harrison territory: urban paranoia, a seedily unreliable guru, bad sex, guilty rituals to propitiate a metaphysical-seeming threat called the Shrander—a pursuing image out of nightmare. In the lab, both Kearney and Tate fear the increasing quantum strangeness of their results.

The cosmological wonders and hazards of the Beach form a backdrop to space pursuits and violent skirmishes whose duration is measured in nanoseconds, reported in tensely lyrical prose. Eventually everything comes together as it should—even that oppressive 1999 story strand—with revelations, transformation, transcendence, and ultimate hope. Harrison demands your full attention and rewards it richly. —David Langford

Published in 1917, "Light and Dark" is unlike any of Natsume Soseki's previous works and unique in Japanese fiction of the period. What distinguishes the novel as "modern" is its remarkable representation of interiority. The protagonists, Tsuda Yoshio, thirty, and his wife O-Nobu, twenty-three, exhibit a gratifying complexity that qualifies them as some of the earliest examples of three-dimensional characters in Japanese fiction.

O-Nobu is quick-witted and cunning, a snob and narcissist no less than her husband, passionate, arrogant, spoiled, insecure, naive — yet, above all, gallant. Under Soseki's scrutiny, she emerges as a flesh-and-blood heroine with a palpable reality, dueling with her husband, his troublemaking friend, Kobayashi, and her sister-in-law, O-Hid?. Tsuda undertakes his own battles with Kobayashi, O-Hid? and the manipulative Madam Yoshikawa, his boss's wife. These exchanges explode into moments of intense jealousy, rancor, and recrimination that will surprise English-speaking readers who expect indirectness, delicacy, and reticence in Japanese relations. Echoing the work of Jane Austen and Henry James, Soseki's novel achieves maximal drama with minimal action and symbolizes a tectonic shift in literary form.

A haunting, enigmatic, Kafkaesque modern fairytale, steeped in visual imagery and consolingly lyrical prose. The Times February is persecuting the townspeople. It has been winter for more than three hundred days. All forms of flight are banned and the children have started to disappear, taken from their beds in the middle of the night. The priests hang ominous sheets of parchment on the trees, signed "February". And somewhere on the outskirts of the town lives February himself, with the girl who smells of honey and smoke… In short bursts of intensely poetic language, this beautifully strange and otherworldly first novel tells the story of the people in the town and their efforts to combat the mysterious spectre of February. Steeped in visual imagery, this is a hauntingly enigmatic modern fairy tale in which nothing is as it seems.

"Engrossing, thrilling and ultimately satisfying: each story has the weight of a novel." — The Economist

This was the day after Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. You remember that. It was a moment in history — not like Kennedy or the planes flying into the World Trade Center — not up at that level. This was something much lower, more like Ben Johnson, back when his eyes were that thick, yellow color and he tested positive in Seoul after breaking the world-record in the hundred. You might not know exactly where you were standing or exactly what you were doing when you first heard about Tyson or about Ben, but when the news came down, I bet it stuck with you. When Tyson bit off Holyfield’s ear, that cut right through the everyday clutter. — from Miracle Mile

Two runners race a cargo train through the darkness of a rat-infested tunnel beneath the Detroit River. A drugstore bicycle courier crosses a forbidden threshold in an attempt to save a life and a young swimmer conquers her fear of water only to discover she's caught in far more dangerous currents. An auto-worker who loses his family in a car accident is forced to reconsider his relationship with the internal combustion engine.

Alexander MacLeod is a writer of "ferocious intelligence" and "ferocious physicality" (CTV). Light Lifting, his celebrated first collection, offers us a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies that explore the depths of the psyche and channel the subconscious hopes and terrors that motivate us all. These are elemental stories of work and its bonds, of tragedy and tragedy barely averted, but also of beauty, love and fragile understanding.

In contrast to the tranquil beauty of Flathead Lake and the colorful summertime larch and fir unspooling across unblemished ranchland, a venomous presence lurks in the caves and hills, intent on destroying innocent lives.

First, Alafair Robicheaux is nearly killed by an arrow while hiking alone on a trail. Then Clete’s daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, whom readers met in Burke’s previous bestseller Creole Belle, runs afoul of a local cop, with dire consequences. Next, Alafair thinks she sees a familiar face following her around town — but how could convicted sadist and serial killer Asa Surrette be loose on the streets of Montana?

Surrette committed a string of heinous murders while capital punishment was outlawed in his home state of Kansas. Years ago, Alafair, a lawyer and novelist, interviewed Surrette in prison, aiming to prove him guilty of other crimes and eligible for the death penalty. Recently, a prison transport van carrying Surrette crashed and he is believed dead, but Alafair isn’t so sure.

Peregrine Jay, owner of the Dolphin Theatre, is putting on a magnificent production of Macbeth, the play that, superstition says, always brings bad luck. But one night the claymore swings and the dummy's head is more than real: murder behind the scene. Luckily, Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn is in the audience…

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master.

It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair.

Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.

Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.

Reviewers and readers agree that Michael Connelly is writing at the top of his game, giving us crime fiction of the dark side of Los Angeles and reinventing the form with every book he writes. At the end of CITY OF BONES Bosch quit the LAPD, but he's back in a new role, one that will give him more freedom to pursue the cases that compel him. When he left the LAPD Bosch took a file with him the case of a film production assistant murdered four years earlier during a USD 2 million robbery on a movie set. The LAPD now operating under post 9/11 rules think the stolen money was used to finance a terrorist training camp. Thoughts of the original murder victim are lost in the federal zeal, and when it seems the killer will be set free to aid the feds' terrorist hunt, Bosch quickly runs afoul of both his old colleagues and the FBI.

Оригинальный и необычный мир сумеречного нуара. Фэнтезийная действительность испорчена гангстерами «иженерами» тридцатых годов двадцатого века. Автоматами Томпсона и черными Бентли, соседствующих с магией и драконами. Плюс детектив в духе неповторимых королей нуара: Чейза и Чайндлера. Незлой и добродушный, бывший офицер-инструктор стрельбы СССР и следователь из Питера Максим Светляков попадает в этот загибающийся и находящийся накануне грандиозной войны загадочный мир Бриджпорта. Загадка встает за загадкой перед «нашим парнем». Как спастись от магического проклятия мертвой династии королей-магов Дан-Дан Флоров? Откуда появились таинственные Зингару — раса «львиномордых» гуманоидов. Кто такой, двести двадцать седьмой в череде реинкарнации, магистр и настоятель ордена пустынных рыцарей? Могучих аскетов и супер воинов. Почему ему сняться крайне странные сны? И даже гениальный изобретатель прошлого Никола Тесла, здесь как-то примешан?! Не говоря уже о демонах в боевой броне космодесанта. Приключения и детективно-магическое расследование Макса Лайта продолжается во второй части романа: «Лангвар и Запах Бури».

1.0 — создание файла

Otherland—the private, multidimensional universe created and controlled by The Grail Brotherhood, an organization made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals—was crumbling. The Brotherhood's plans for immortality within the network had been shattered by the monstrous intelligence that ran the network, a presence known only as the Other, and by the even more monstrous human being who called himself John Dread. Seizing control of the network from his employer, Felix Jongleur, Dread had now made himself the god of this virtual universe and was systematically turning the network's worlds into killing grounds.

As helplessly trapped as Renie Sulaweyo, !Xabbu, Sam Fredericks, Martine, Paul Jonas, and the rest of the small band who had entered Otherland in an attempt to save the many children held captive within this virtual reality, Jongleur was now forced to make common cause with his enemies. Yet even as they struggled through the maze of invented worlds, striving to reach the true heart of Otherland, time was growing short.

Caught in the surreal and deadly landscapes of the failing network, the desperate band battled against increasing odds to save the children, solve the bizarre mysteries of Otherland, and escape back to reality.

But before long there might not be a "real" world to return to for any of them. For destroying Jongleur's playground was merely a dress rehearsal for Johnny Dread. Dread's ultimate plan was to gain control of Jongleur's massive corporate holdings and spread apocalyptic destruction throughout the entire Earth. . . .

Clement’s Mission of Gravity was the engaging tale of the adventures of Barlennan, a sea captain among his caterpillar-like people, on the high-gravity world of Mesklin. In Star Light Barlennan and his sailors go with humans to the even stranger world of Dhrawn, a “crusted star” of the type mentioned by Harlow Shapley. Dhrawn circles the feeble red star Lalande 21185, which actually exists (although the planet is fictionalized). Most of the book is the story of a huge landship crossing Dhrawn’s solid surface crewed by these nonhuman sailors, amidst bizarre dangers, and trying to keep Barlennan’s strange plan secret from humans. The characters, despite being mostly from Barlennan’s world, Mesklin, are well drawn and the setting is well realized. Readers bewildered by the melting and freezing of Dhrawn’s ammonia-water hydrosphere will do well to consult a phase diagram.

Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1971.

She went to Paris to start over, to make art instead of being made into it.

A captivating debut novel by Whitney Scharer, The Age of Light tells the story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as a muse. “I’d rather take a photograph than be one,” she declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. But Man Ray turns out to be an egotistical, charismatic force, and as they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee’s life forever.

Lee’s journey takes us from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from discovering radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it’s possible to reconcile romantic desire with artistic ambition-and what she will have to sacrifice to do so.

Told in interweaving timelines, this sensuous, richly detailed novel brings Lee Miller—a brilliant and pioneering artist—out of the shadows of a man’s legacy and into the light.

Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen learns the hard way that going home again can be deadly. While clearing out her deceased father's desk, Maggie discovers that he had locked away potential evidence in a brutal unsolved murder 30 years earlier. When she begins to ask questions of family and old friends, it emerges that there are people in that seemingly tranquil multi-ethnic Berkeley neighborhood who will go to lethal lengths to prevent the truth from coming out. With the help of her new love, Jean-Paul Bernard, Maggie uncovers secrets about the murdered Vietnamese mother of a good friend and learns how the crime affected – and continues to affect – the still close-knit neighborhood. The more she finds out, the greater the threat of violence becomes, not only for the long-time neighborhood residents, but even for Maggie herself.

THE END IS JUST THE BEGINNING

It started like any other day…

Jackson Thorne just wants to get home. With a flu epidemic sweeping the nation, his ranch is the only place he wants to be. Jack is trying to do the right thing. One more day in Atlanta, and Jack is home free.

By the time it’s over, nothing will ever be the same…

But things never go according to plan.

Something is happening. People are changing, and what should have been a routine trip ends with Jack fighting for his life against the dead.

Now saddled with a civilian and with no way to get home, Jack has to find a way out of a city that has fallen into a world that might be next…

Nothing is simple for the men and women in Donald Antrim’s stories. As they do the things we all do — bum a cigarette at a party, stroll with a girlfriend down Madison Avenue, take a kid to the zoo — they’re confronted with their own uncooperative selves. These artists, writers, lawyers, teachers, and actors make fools of themselves, spiral out of control, have delusions of grandeur, despair, and find it hard to imagine a future. They talk, they listen, they hope, they dream. They look for communion in a city, both beautiful and menacing, which can promise so much and yield so little. But they are hungry for life. They want to love and be loved.

These stories, all published in The New Yorker over the last fifteen years, make it clear that Antrim is one of America’s most important writers. His work has been praised by his significant contemporaries, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and George Saunders, who described The Verificationist as “one of the most pleasure-giving, funny, perverse, complicated, addictive novels of the last twenty years.” And here is Antrim’s best book yet: the story collection that reveals him as a master of the form.

"Teige Foley was only a boy when his mother vanished angrily into the Irish mist and the family's great adventure began. His father, Francis, a man of thwarted dreams, dared to steal a valuable telescope from the manor house where he worked. More than a spyglass, it was his passage to the stars, to places he could not otherwise go. And its theft forced Francis Foley and his four sons to flee the narrow life of poverty that imprisoned them." But Ireland was a country "wilder than it is now." Torn apart by the violent countryside, the young boys would lose sight of their father, and each would have to find his own path…Tomas, the eldest, weak for the pleasures of the flesh…Finan, who would chase his longings across the globe…Finbar, Finan's twin, surrendering to other people's magic…and Teige, the youngest, the one who has a way with horses, the only one to truly return home. From boarding house to gypsy caravans, from the sere fields where potatoes wither on their stalks to fertile new lands on the other side of the earth, apart and adrift, reunited and reborn, they would learn about the callings of God, the power of love, and the meaning of family in a place where stars look down — and men look up.

From award-winning author Guy Gavriel Kay, who "stands among the world's finest fantasy authors" (Montreal Gazette), comes a sweeping tale evocative of the Celtic and Norse cultures of the ninth and tenth centuries, filled with the human passion and epic adventure he is noted for.

The Light and the Dark is the second in the Strangers and Brothers series. The story is set in Cambridge, but the plot also moves to Monte Carlo, Berlin and Switzerland. Lewis Eliot narrates the career of a childhood friend. Roy Calvert is a brilliant but controversial linguist who is about to be elected to a fellowship.

In The Light Fantastic only one individual can save the world from a disastrous collision. Unfortunately, the hero happens to be the singularly inept wizard Rincewind, who was last seen falling off the edge of the world…

Annotations collected and edited by Leo Breebaarted at http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/the-light-fantastic.html

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.

With The Machinery of Light, David J. Williams completes his furiously paced, stunningly imagined trilogy - a work of vision, beauty, and pulse-pounding futuristic action.

September 26, 2110. 10:22 GMT. Following the assassination of the American president, the generals who have seized power initiate World War Three, launching a surprise attack against the Eurasian Coalition's forces throughout the Earth-Moon system. Across the orbits, tens of thousands of particle beams and lasers blast away at one another. The goal: crush the other side's weaponry, paving the way for nuclear bombardment of the cities.

As inferno becomes Armageddon, the rogue commando unit Autumn Rain embarks on one last run. Matthew Sinclair, an imprisoned spymaster, plots his escape. And his former protégé Claire Haskell, capable of hacking into both nets and minds, is realizing that all her powers may merely be playing into Sinclair's plans. For even as Claire evades the soldiers of East and West amid carnage in the lunar tunnels, the surviving members of the Rain converge upon the Moon, one step ahead of the Eurasian fleets but one step behind the mastermind who created Autumn Rain - and his terrible final secret.

“A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.”

— William Gibson

“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood… Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.”

— Hazel Carby

“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself… This book is invaluable gay history.”

— Inches Magazine

Born in New York City’s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non-fiction

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous science fiction books including, Dhalgren and The Mad Man, as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He lives in New York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the past hundred years tochange our concept of gayness, and he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

Robot evolution has advanced to the point that intelligent robots have liberated themselves from servitude, defending themselves from servitude, defending themselves against the humans who work to exterminate them using super-machines.

The ultimate hope of the most powerfully intelligent robots lies in the attainment of human consciousness. And they are willing to steal men’s souls if they must, to get this final elusive quality for themselves.

Only one free robot, Jasperodus, has been granted true consciousness—a soul—by his maker, now long dead. Brought into the soul research project by force, Jasperodus faces a moral dilemma: to release his secret and bring about the final downfall of humanity to a new race of super-robots, or to keep his own kind forever from the light of consciousness. And the mechanized armies of the humans press ever forward, seeking the robot hideout.

Having had no choice but to use her power has a necromancer to save Russia from dark forces, Katerina Alexandrovna, Duchess of Oldenburg, now wants to forget that she ever used her special powers. She's about to set off to pursue her lifelong dream of attending medical school when she discovers that Russia's arch nemesis--who she thought she'd destroyed--is still alive. So on imperial orders, Katerina remains at her old finishing school. She'll be safe there, because the empress has cast a potent spell to protect it against the vampires and revenants who are bent on toppling the tsar and using Katerina for their own gains. But to Katerina's horror, the spell unleashes a vengeful ghost within the school, a ghost more dangerous than any creature trying to get in.

From one of the finest short-story writers in Spanish, this is the first anthology of his work to appear in English. Like Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield, Medardo Fraile is a chronicler of the minor tragedies and triumphs of ordinary life, and each short tale opens up an entire exquisite world.

Now you see it....Now you don't....Now you're history.

There are demons in the world. Monsters. Creatures that would steal your soul. You might hide under your covers at night and pretend all's right with the world, but you know. Even if you don't want to admit it...

Las Vegas bar owner Trixa Iktomi deals in information. And in a city where unholy creatures roam the neon night, information can mean life or death. Not that she has anything personal against demons. They can be sexy as hell, and they're great for getting the latest gossip. But they also steal human souls and thrive on chaos. So occasionally Trixa and her friends have to teach them some manners.

When Trixa learns of a powerful artifact known as the Light of Life, she knows she's hit the jackpot. Both sides — angel and demon — would give anything for it. But first she has to find it. And as Heaven and Hell ready for an apocalyptic throwdown, Trixa must decide where her true loyalty lies — and what she's ready to fight for. Because in her world, if you line up on the wrong side, you pay with more than your life...

Amazon.com

The author of Neuromancer takes you to the vividly realized near future of 2005. Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here the millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pick-pocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich–or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash.

From Publishers Weekly

Gibson's cyberpunk thriller set in a near-future L.A.–a two-week PW bestseller–depicts the hunt for virtual reality glasses containing classified data.

Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Book Description

2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here the millenium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rentacop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle messenger turned pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich–or get you killed. Now Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash...

Ivan Klima was in the United States when Russian tanks entered Prague in 1968 but, against the advice of friends, he returned home. He became a dissident, writing books (never published) that were invariably inspired by Czechoslovakia's repressive regime. But what happens to a rebel artist when there is nothing left to rebel against? This question informs Klima's powerful novel, "Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light," which describes life before, during, and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It is the story of Pavel, a middle-aged television cameraman working uneasily within the boundaries set by the regime, who dreams of one day making a film — a searing portrait of his times — that the authorities will never allow. But after the collapse of communism, Pavel finds he is unprepared for this new world of unlimited freedoms. He never quite gets around to making that film; his time is taken up instead with lucrative small jobs — a TV spot, a commercial, a porn film. This is a masterful novel that focuses on the most pressing issue confronting the individual in the former Soviet bloc countries today: how to live one's life when one is truly free.

From Jay Asher, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Thirteen Reasons Why, comes a romance that will break your heart, but soon have you believing again….

Sierra’s family runs a Christmas tree farm in Oregon—it’s a bucolic setting for a girl to grow up in, except that every year, they pack up and move to California to set up their Christmas tree lot for the season. So Sierra lives two lives: her life in Oregon and her life at Christmas. And leaving one always means missing the other.

Until this particular Christmas, when Sierra meets Caleb, and one life eclipses the other.

By reputation, Caleb is not your perfect guy: years ago, he made an enormous mistake and has been paying for it ever since. But Sierra sees beyond Caleb’s past and becomes determined to help him find forgiveness and, maybe, redemption. As disapproval, misconceptions, and suspicions swirl around them, Caleb and Sierra discover the one thing that transcends all else: true love.

What Light is a love story that’s moving and life-affirming and completely unforgettable.

Премия за достижения в научной фантастике (Премия "Хьюго") в 1968 г. (категория "Роман").

Коротка и тяжела жизнь человека, и на всем ее протяжении обязан он нести ярмо, тяжким трудом зарабатывая себе на кусок хлеба. Непосильные заботы старят его раньше времени, палящие лучи солнца сжигают кожу, а тучи насекомых из джунглей неустанно сосут кровь. Но бойся убивать их – не исключено, что в один прекрасный день ты окажешься на их месте. Во всяком случае, так вполне могут решить следящие за твоей кармой ее Повелители. Муха или собака, обезьяна или лягушка – любое тело ты можешь заслужить, если твоя жизнь отклонится от канонов, заповеданных богами. И нет способа избежать неотвратимого наказания, кроме, быть может, одного – умереть Истинной Смертью.

Впрочем, не все так плохо. Если ты прожил все эти годы законопослушно и богобоязненно, после смерти тебе предоставят новое тело – молодое и сильное, здоровое и красивое и, возможно, даже приблизят к самим богам, призвав служить в райские сады – места их проживания. И там тебе обязательно выпадет счастливая возможность увидеть, как принимают они свою истинную Форму и обретают свой Атрибут. Могучий Брахма, Повелитель богов, прекрасная Кали, богиня разрушения, грозный Яма, бог смерти, сладкоголосый Вишну, повелитель музыки и песен, – они все там, и в один прекрасный день на тебя наверняка упадет их благосклонный взгляд.

И только горстка отщепенцев недовольна этим миром. Во главе их стоит неугомонный Сиддхарта, Махасаматман, мятежный Бич Демонов, предпочитающий имя Сэм еще с тех пор, как входил в экипаж разбившегося на этой странной планете, забытой всеми богами мира, пассажирского лайнера. Сэм, один из Первых, гроза безжалостных демонов-ракшасов, пожирающих души и порабощающих тела, Сэм, чьим Атрибутом является способность обуздывать электромагнитные поля любой природы. Впрочем, про корабль помнят разве что сами Первые – экипаж и пассажиры этого корабля, чудом выжившие после катастрофы и в процессе бесконечных возрождений обретших уникальные способности. Для всех прочих этот мир – лучший и единственный, и упаси их Брахма хотя бы немного усомниться в этом. А потому и верят люди, что не было никакого Махасаматмана, и Будда – лишь воплощение великого Вишну, неправильно понятого излишне рьяными сторонниками, и вращаются за монетку молитвенные машины, вознося к небесам неслышимые молитвы и засчитывая жертвователю дополнительные очки на Возрождение...

Перевод: В. Лапицкий

OCR: Игорь Максин

Вычитка: Maxxz

Согласно письму от Ольги Косовой (переводчика книг Терри Гудкайнд), переводы книг Терри Гудкайнд (согласно списку) выполненных Ольгой Косовой (в том числе и под псевдонимом О. Ломакина) удалены из библиотеки.

Список удаленных книг:

Первое правило волшебника.

Второе правило волшебника, или камень слез.

Третье правило волшебника, или Защитники паствы.

Четвертое правило волшебника, или Храм ветров.

Пятое правило волшебника, или Дух огня.

Шестое правило волшебника, или Вера павших.

Возможно дальнейшее расширение списка.

Просьба не тратить свои силы на их повторное добавление, так как они будут удаляться администрацией в минимальные сроки.

Книга «По обе стороны поводка» – сборник увлекательных рассказов о собаках. Авторы – известные зарубежные писатели – показывают различные стороны характера этих животных, их бескорыстную любовь и привязанность к человеку. Большинство рассказов, неизвестных широкому читателю, основано на реальных фактах, и, прочитав их, вы узнаете много нового и интересного о своих четвероногих друзьях.

Для широкого круга читателей.

Остропроблемная психологическая повесть, о школьниках, о столкновении подростка с молодыми правонарушителями в современной Англии

История экстраординарной жизни одного из самых любимых писателей в мире!

В мире продано около 100 миллионов экземпляров переведенных на 37 языков романов Терри Пратчетта. Целый легион фанатов из года в год читает и перечитывает книги сэра Терри. Все знают Плоский мир, первый роман о котором вышел в далеком 1983 году. Но он не был первым романом Пратчетта и даже не был первым романом о мире-диске. Никто еще не рассматривал автора и его творчество на протяжении четырех десятилетий, не следил за возникновением идей и их дальнейшим воплощением. В 2007 году Пратчетт объявил о том, что у него диагностирована болезнь Альцгеймера и он не намерен сдаваться. Книга исследует то, как бесстрашная борьба с болезнью отразилась на его героях и атмосфере последних романов.

Книга также включает обширные приложения: библиографию и фильмографию, историю театральных постановок и приложение о котах.