A star of everywhere except his own home, it's hard for Jerome Stevens to balance the demands of touring with family life. The circuit is a cynical world of extremes where money talks, agents slither and audiences throw mince pies. We meet Jerome as he tries to make people laugh for a living. We follow him from the blind terror of a first open spot, to facing an audience of trained killers in the Falklands, from the trauma of live television, to being chased out of Wales by an angry mob of brewery staff. Violent bouncers, paranoid celebrities and comedy producers without a sense of humour all compete to milk the cash-cow that is comedy, each desperately trying to grab at what they think are the udders of laughter. But throughout it all, the hero's biggest critic remains his own seven-year old son. Oh, and all this is recounted while being in prison in China. This hilarious account could only be written by somebody who's been there, with many of the extraordinary characters in the book being an amalgam of the personalities and characters and oddballs found found on the comedy circuit. 'If you haven't caught up with Jones yet - do so!' Daily Mail Milton Jones is a multi-award winning comedian (including the prestigious Perrier Award) who has made numerous radio and TV appearances including The Very World of Milton Jones and Another Case of Milton Jones on BBC Radio 4. He regularly features on Radio and TV panel games.

    David Williams’s novel is a thrilling read, part love story, part mystery—a tale of time travel (or is it madness?) that keeps the reader guessing until the very end. Now back in print, this exquisitely written book is not to be missed.

    In present day Washington, D.C., an employee stands before the controlling board of his company and makes a pitch that will either make or end his career. In Boston Harbor, shipments of high-end automobiles bound for Italy and containers of refugees inbound from Cuba continue to go missing.At the center of everything stands Thorn Byrd, a recent college graduate just twenty-two years old. Plucked away from the life he had planned and thrust into one he never knew existed, he is forced to decipher who is behind the sinister plot unfolding around him and the global implications it holds.Aiding in his journey are the combined forces of the Cuban and Irish cartels, both of which have lost a great deal of face and are seeking revenge, along with a brother/sister pair desperate to find a lost family member. Opposing them are a conglomerate with ties reaching back to the Second World War and bent on righting wrongs seventy years in the making.Armed only with his instincts and the help of those around him, Thorn must determine who to trust and what to do before it is too late.

     Suddenly his life is turned upside down when an earthquake hits his sleepy town of Valley City, North Dakota. He panics, and makes a fatal decision that lands him in court. While stuck in limbo at Juvie, he is cut off from his family, tormented by bullies, and treated like a criminal. Worst of all, no one believes him. After all, no one else felt the earthquake. Is he lying? Or are darker forces at play? The Last Day of Freedom is the first book in the teen fantasy series, The Natural Order.

     Two royal brothers find themselves in the midst of an ancient struggle. One brother is on the hunt of a dreaded order of assassins deep in the barbarian kingdoms of old. The other refuses to be a pawn and seeks to walk his own path. Both are the instruments of destiny. An enemy that lurks in the shadows will strike out at the Free Nations threatening the very foundation holding them together and bringing them to the brink of war. Haven of Shadows is the first book in the Broken Crown trilogy, an epic fantasy that features fast-paced action and a breathtaking world of high adventure.

    The one thing that lets him escape the monotony is writing his fantasy novel, Keeper of the Well. Until he discovers something about his book that leaves him terrified, something impossible. Jack’s normal life is thrown into chaos, and he finds himself wrapped up in an adventure wilder than anything he could have written himself. An ancient order from another world threatens to destroy Earth, and mankind will be defenseless without his help. Soon, Jack will realize he must bear the weight of destiny upon his shoulders. Keeper of the Well is a thrilling, unique take on modern fantasy that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

    ever. This book left me speechless and with my heart in my throat the whole way through..." Sometimes, love can surprise you… Rowan McClain has everything a girl could ask for: a handsome, charming husband and a successful career as a romance writer. But when Prince Charming’s affections begin to wane and her mother’s cancer returns, Rowan’s perfect world begins to crumble. When Army Lieutenant Luke Cartwright arrives in Iraq, the last thing on his mind is falling in love. But when a friend gives him a copy of RJ McClain’s book, he writes a letter to the author using his friend’s name on the return address. After exchanging several letters and sharing their deepest secrets, the two become unlikely friends. After a year with no letter from Iraq, Rowan becomes convinced that the soldier she had befriended has been killed in the line of duty. Now divorced from her husband, she moves on with her life. But when her sister sets her up on a blind date with a soldier named Luke Cartwright, Rowan begins to feel as though she has met him before. Will she give into her feelings for him? Or will thoughts of the man she had come to love through his beautiful letters keep her from giving her heart to Luke? What Fans are Saying: “One of my top five favorites... ever. This book left me speechless and with my heart in my throat the whole way through. The emotions were intense, the characters were perfect and it will take me a long time to get it out of my head. I am in love with Luke and Rowan and wish their story had never ended.” BookLover70 “It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry, it will make you believe in true love. 5 Stars!” MelanieB “Luke and Rowan’s story was just so true to life. This was such a well written book; the characters so believable. This one is just emotional from the beginning, from romance to humor to tears. Definitely a read again book.” Sherri M

     TALON: Book 1 of the Windwalker Archive follows the early years of a unique boy, a fifteen year old runt living on the barbarian island of Volnoss. Born premature during the frozen plague that took his mother, shunned by his father, and raised by his grandmother, Talon has always felt like he doesn't belong. For years he dreams of growing big and strong like the giants that surround him. But as the day of measure draws near, he begins to realize that he will never be named a Vald, and will be cast to the village of the Skomm to live a life of slavery. Barely surviving the beating that follows his failure to meet the measure, Talon is banished to the village of misfits. There he finds friends in the most unlikely of places, and begins to hope he might find some happiness as a Skomm. As Talon tries to settle into his life in the slave village he is challenged at every turn. The Vaka overseers have it in for him, as does the Chiefson of Timber Wolf Tribe. The Kelda Agaeti is drawing near, called by the Skomm the night of dying, when seven warriors from neighboring tribes win the right to go on a bloody rampage through the village. After barely surviving a random attack by drunken Vald that left nearly a dozen dead, Talon and his friends decide that they must somehow escape the island. For Chiefson Fylkin has vowed to kill him first on the night of dying. What follows is a fast-paced race against time, an underdog story wrought with action and adventure, rich with magic, culture, friendship and lore. Set two hundred years before the events of Whill of Agora, The Windwalker Archive reveals the origins of Dirk Blackthorn’s spirit wolf, Chief. Fans of the Legends of Agora books will be introduced to unforgettable new characters, and revisit a few old friends. Although this trilogy takes place chronologically before Whill of Agora, it can be read before or after as a standalone series.

    Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, they are permeated by his own history as well as America’s.In The House of the Seven Gables, for example, Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era.Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world.Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter.The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts.The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

    Just as she contemplates leaving him, she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. As she grapples with this news, she learns that her loathed father has killed himself. Left confused and bereft by these developments and haunted by visions of a little boy, she meets a seductive young painter and, despite knowing it could lead to crisis, begins an affair with him in her eighth month of pregnancy.Told with an eye for startling details and an unerring sense for psychological truth, this harrowing, passionate, obsessively compelling literary debut captures the reality of a young woman's inner landscape while spinning a tale that will hypnotise readers to its last satisfying pages.

    Noir. The scenes where Farrell visits with the patients [at UCLA Children's Hospital], canny judges of character and tuning forks for emotional truth, carry devastating weight, and Nova's smooth prose brings the roiling undercurrents to the surface. He's fashioned a series character well worth revisiting. " — The New York Times Quinn Farrell is a modern-day fixer in Los Angeles — he cleans up other people’s messes. Rich people’s messes. For a lot of money. He’s so good that he’s become indispensable to Hollywood moguls and he’s managed to construct a working moral framework so that he can live with himself. That is until a new neighbor moves next door, Rose Marie, who works with terminally ill teens. Against all his survival instincts, Farrell falls in love with Rose Marie and then her uncanny patients, who shine a spotlight into his soul. When a client steps over the line and Farrell is hired to clean up after a reprehensible crime, his carefully constructed ethical house of cards comes crashing down. Double Solitaire is the first in a series of LA-based thrillers featuring Quinn Farrell,. As with all Nova’s deeply intuitive fiction, Farrell is an unforgettable living force in a setting that needs no fiction to be any weirder than it is: contemporary Hollywood.

    Eliza Jekyll, daughter of the infamous Dr. Henry Jekyll—pursues a dangerous murderer in an alternate Victorian London.In an electrified Victorian London, Dr. Eliza Jekyll is a crime scene investigator, hunting killers with newfangled technological gadgets. She will need every advantage available to catch a terrifying new psychopath splattering London with blood. Hidden in the grimy shadows, the fiendish murderer preys on beautiful women, drugging them before slicing off their limbs. Finding the “Slicer” can make Eliza’s career . . . or unmask her darkest secret. Like her father, she has a hidden second self that emerges when she drinks his forbidden magical elixir. Just a few sips, and a seductive and impulsive Lizzie Hyde is unleashed.The members of the Royal Society do not trust Eliza, and they send their enforcer, the mercurial Captain Lafayette, to prove she’s a dangerous sorceress. The careful doctor knows that one wrong step can make her prey to the clever Lafayette, a man who harbors an evil curse of his own. No matter how much she craves the elixir, she must resist.But as the Slicer case draws her into London’s luminous magical underworld, Eliza will need the potion’s power to help her . . . even if it might attract the attentions of Lafayette. .Even if it means setting the wild Lizzie free. . . .

    The isolated house he buys sight unseen should give him the space to come to terms with his grief and the quiet to allow him to work. Kilnsgate House turns out to be rather more than he expected, however. A man died there, sixty years ago. His wife was convicted of murder. And something is pulling Chris deeper and deeper into the story of Grace Elizabeth Fox, who was hanged by the neck until she was dead...

    It is our hope that in this anthology you will find a story to love. We come from as varied backgrounds as we do locations. Hawaii to New York, California to Texas, and Texas to Tennessee; we have come together to share our love of storytelling. The characters within these pages are a wondrous mix as well. A flamboyant Knoxville designer, a 1900s investigative reporter, a neurosurgeon, a coroner, a woman dripping of Russian opulence and Parisian elegance, a detective that has simply had enough, and a Tennessee Police Chief all fill the pages and the imagination in Death of Choice. Come along with us to a Children’s Cemetery, 1920’s London, a daisy fresh diner in L.A., a fog shrouded barn, a small town in Tennessee, a Honolulu beach, and meet a collection of short stories from writers that will give you chills, thrills, and a set of tales you will long remember. Our hope is through these intriguing introductions you will discover an author or two you will want to read more of, and get to know better. Each of the authors in this anthology have many more books for you to enjoy. So find that spot where you love to curl up and read, and enjoy this collection of murder, mayhem and mystery. Micheal Maxwell Editor and Compiler September 2015

    It was at such a time that, in a quaint village in south India, a young boy was found in deep meditation. He would say, ‘I have family everywhere. People are waiting for me.’ Nobody believed him then. Time revealed the destiny of the millions who came to him to discover themselves. Over the years, his sublime presence and pragmatic teachings would foster the values of joy, peace and love across the world. His transformative art of breathing, the Sudarshan Kriya, became a household practice, an alternative way of life that inspired people to seek self-realization. He became the guru who made the ethereal tangible, who brought about a profound shift in every sphere of human endeavour—from art to architecture, health care to rehabilitation, inner peace to outer dynamism. From a carefree child to a teenager often found in the company of saints, from a young meditation teacher to a revered spiritual Master, this book is an intimate and affectionate account of the life of Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar by his sister Bhanumathi Narasimhan, who witnessed his mystical life unfold up-close. Gurudev: On the Plateau of the Peak is an attempt to fit the ocean in a teacup, offering readers a sip of infinity.