One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis.

    

    Estranged from his family, living alone with only his cat Cabbage for company, he was unprepared for the doctor’s diagnosis that he has only months to live. But before he can set about tackling his bucket list, the Devil appears with a special offer: in exchange for making one thing in the world disappear, he can have one extra day of life. And so begins a very bizarre week . . .Because how do you decide what makes life worth living? How do you separate out what you can do without from what you hold dear? In dealing with the Devil our narrator will take himself – and his beloved cat – to the brink. Genki Kawamura's If Cats Disappeared from the World is a story of loss and reconciliation, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.This beautiful tale is translated from the Japanese by Eric Selland, who also translated The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. Fans of The Guest Cat and The Travelling Cat Chronicles will also surely love If Cats Disappeared from the World.

    In a profoundly strange country called Inner Horner, large enough for only one resident at a time, citizens waiting to enter the country fall under the rule of the power-hungry and tyrannical Phil, setting off a chain of injustice and mass hysteria.An Animal Farm for the 21st century, this is an incendiary political satire of unprecedented imagination, spiky humor, and cautionary appreciation for the hysteric in everyone.

    Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers to donate sleep to an insomniac. Under the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers the Corps' reach has grown, with outposts in every major US city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia, has spent the past seven years recruiting for the Corps. But Trish’s faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter when she is confronted by “Baby A,” the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious "Donor Y."Sleep Donation explores a world facing the end of sleep as we know it, where “Night Worlds” offer black market remedies to the desperate and sleep deprived, and where even the act of making a gift is not as simple as it appears.

    Read on for more from this exceptional character. Please note: This story includes language that some might find offensive.

    Sometimes the end is just the beginning . . . Sam Elling works for an internet dating company, but he still can't get a date. So he creates an algorithm that will match you with your soul mate. Sam meets the love of his life, a coworker named Meredith, but he also gets fired when the company starts losing all their customers to Mr. and Ms. Right.When Meredith's grandmother, Livvie, dies suddenly, Sam uses his ample free time to create a computer program that will allow Meredith to have one last conversation with her grandmother. Mining from all her correspondence—email, Facebook, Skype, texts—Sam constructs a computer simulation of Livvie who can respond to email or video chat just as if she were still alive. It's not supernatural, it's computer science.Meredith loves it, and the couple begins to wonder if this is something that could help more people through their grief. And thus, the company RePose is born. The business takes off, but for every person who just wants to say good-bye, there is someone who can't let go. In the meantime, Sam and Meredith's affection for one another deepens into the kind of love that once tasted, you can't live without. But what if one of them suddenly had to? This entertaining novel, delivers a charming and bittersweet romance as well as a lump in the throat exploration of the nature of love, loss, and life (both real and computer simulated). Maybe nothing was meant to last forever, but then again, sometimes love takes on a life of its own.

    Amish Christian Romance Fiction When Vivian answers an advertisement to spend Christmas at a B&B in the country, she doesn't realize it is run by an Amish family who is just as broken as she is. Trying to rekindle the Christmas spirit, can Vivian fit in with the Amish family and join forces to help each other through the holidays? Will it take a modern-day miracle to make things right again?

    Not since the love of her life, Pierce McGovern, left her years ago without a word. Now, she leads a quiet life surrounded by her four matchmaking sisters, running a historic movie theater and collecting old wartime letters. But she leaves the letters unopened, preferring to imagine their possibilities rather than risk being disappointed.Then Pierce comes back to town, shattering Brenna's hard-earned peace-and forcing her to re-examine everything, and realize that if she doesn't come to terms with the life she let slip away, she may never have the courage to go after the life she wants.

    But these houses aren’t normal, and nor is what’s inside them! With her old wounds recently reopened, Jenna is in desperate need of a new start, and her friend Tiff thinks she’s found just the thing when her company needs someone to watch over a trio of houses. Set in an idyllic location in the Shropshire Hills, the houses lie empty, tied up in a legal battle, but from the outset Jenna knows there’s something wrong with them – and it’s not just down to the vicious wrangling between the owners, either! Why does it feel like the houses are talking to her? And who is the mysterious ex-soldier in the only other house on the hill? Why does he hate the owners so badly, and does he know more of what’s going on than Jenna has been told? Join Jenna as she unravels the secret of the houses while she struggles to heal her own inner scars, and in the process finds unexpected friends and inner reserves she didn’t know she had. If you love paranormal mysteries by authors such as Barbara Erskine and Phil Rickman; the magical realism of J S Donovan, Diane Setterfield and Melissa Payne; or the magical elements of Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John Grey novels, then this is a book for you! Grab a copy today and join Jenna on the mysterious Welsh Borders!

    Illustrator and writer's Carolyn Marie Castagna's first shared short story.A small icicle hanging from a roof peers inside a window at a small reading room, and learns about magical human qualities, and the importance of the one most special human feeling.

    Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St Vitus' Hospital for the Mentally Ill to discover a world full of unimaginable strangeness: office buildings vanish without reason, small animals turn up without their heads, and cruel villains ride city buses to complete their evil schemes." Lost within this unwelcoming place, Billy finds the companionship of two lonely children, Effie and Gus Mumford - one a science fair genius, the other a charming, silent bully. With a nearly forgotten bravery, Billy confronts the monotony of his job in telephone sales, the awkward beauty of a desperate pickpocket named Penny Maple, and the seemingly impossible solution to the mystery of his sister's death. Along the path laden with hidden clues and codes that dare to be deciphered, the boy detective may learn the greatest secret of all: the necessity of the unknown.

    With her, she brings her young daughter, Liv, who grows up isolated and unable or unwilling to make friends her own age, spending much of her time alone, or with an elderly neighbour, Kyrre Jonsson, who beguiles her with old folk tales and stories about trolls, mermaids and -- crucially for the events that unfold in the summer of her eighteenth year -- about the huldra, a wild spirit who appears in the form of an irresistibly beautiful girl, to lure young men to their doom. Now twenty-eight, Liv looks back on her life and particularly to that summer when two boys drowned under mysterious circumstances in the still moonlit waters off the shores of Kvaloya. Were the deaths accidental, or were the boys, as Kyrre believes, lured to their deaths by a malevolent spirit? To begin with, Liv dismisses the old man's stories as fantasy, but as the summer continues and events take an even darker turn, she comes to believe that something supernatural is happening on the island. But is it? Or is Liv, a lonely girl who has spent her entire life in the shadow of her beautiful, gifted mother, slowly beginning to lose touch with reality? Set in the white nights of an Arctic summer, the novel has the heightened, hallucinogenic atmosphere of a dream, but culminates in a moment of profound horror. Intensely imagined and exquisitely written, A Summer of Drowning is a play of dark and light, of looking and seeing, that will hold and haunt every reader.

    But little does he realize that his most valuable possession, his relationship with his father, is slipping away from him.Of Things Gone Astray is a magical fable about modern life and values and finding the things that really matter.

    Six-year-old Birdie Adams wants to run away and join the circus but guesses she’ll have to go to the first grade and hang around with her new baby brother instead. Maybe her big sister needs a little help, too. The circus will have to wait.Twelve-year-old Melanie Adams wants her friend to stop bugging her to get her first kiss. Melanie’s already had her first kiss, but won’t spoil the special secret by talking about it. Norah Adams is a good mother and wife who wants to keep her family safe and happy, but tucking the order form for dogtags in her daughters’ lunch boxes is a big change from the everyday bologna sandwiches.Lola Carter wants the life her sister, Norah, has. Instead she has a factory job, an alcohol and prescription drug addiction, and an abusive boyfriend. Even if President Kennedy prevents World War III, these women’s lives will be changed forever.