In these rollicking pages you'll find tall ships and desert islands; impossibly gallant adventurers and glamorous heroines; devilishly sinister cads and ghastly dungeons; improbably acrobatic duels and hair's-breadth escapes; and more plot twists than you can shake a rapier at. A deliriously entertaining combination of high-seas action-adventure and comic hi-jinx.

    An underground bestseller in its original self-published edition, Marlo Morgan's powerful tale of challenge and endurance has a message for us all.Summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aborigines to accompany them on walkabout, the woman makes a four-month-long journey and learns how they thrive in natural harmony with the plants and animals that exist in the rugged lands of Australia's bush. From the first day of her adventure, Morgan is challenged by the physical requirements of the journey—she faces daily tests of her endurance, challenges that ultimately contribute to her personal transformation.By traveling with this extraordinary community, Morgan becomes a witness to their essential way of being in a world based on the ancient wisdom and philosophy of a culture that is more than 50,000 years old.

    They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch.Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world's changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery.Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that transcends Joyce Carol Oates's early works, Bellefleur is widely regarded as a masterwork—a feat of literary genius.

    When attractive little Jenny Bunn comes south to teach, she falls in with Patrick Standish, a schoolmaster, and all the rakes and rogues of a provincial "Hell Fire Club".

    Bitter Gold Hearts: The Stormwarden's son has been kidnapped, and Garrett must brave a host of ogres and assassins to rescue him. Cold Copper Tears: There's a new cult in town: worshippers of a godlike Destroyer who think Garrett would make an ideal sacrifice!

    Graves believes also that the author of the Odyssey was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but the young woman who calls herself Nausica in the story.

    They've haunted her since before her mother's death, and she can't get rid of them. She doesn't know how to deal with them and she doesn't want to--they've never led to anything good. She never knows whether she's seeing the past, the present, or the future--it just comes to her.But Gracie is forced to try to use her premonitions. Her best friend, Emily, disappears, and the premonitions lead to the only clues to where she might be--and how she might be saved. Gracie's long-absent father returns, and his history seems mysteriously linked to the disappearance of a student many years ago--and the recent appearance of a body. Gracie's premonitions can lead to answers...but they can also unearth some dark secrets better left unknown.In these two novels, now in one volume, National Book award winner Judy Blundell takes readers on a suspenseful journey where premonitions become a matter of life and death.

    Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where 'no one knows anything' and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - 'Yeah, those animals'.Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox blithely criss-crosses the globe ('New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn') searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.Kill Your Friends is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.

    Paul and Johnnie were born twelve years apart, in a one-bedroom flat in a dingy London suburb. Their ascent to money and power looks easy from a distance, but the seductive brothers burn those who get too close. When Paul marries Louise, Johnnie is part of the contract, and their daughter, Anna, is tangled in it from birth. Paul deals in the development of contaminated land; self-destructive Johnnie deals in crime. When Johnnie has to flee the country, Louise goes with him. Their trip sets in motion inevitabilities that have smoldered beneath the surface from the beginning, a dire and redemptive chain of events that devastates every branch of this crooked family tree. With Your Crooked Heart's sensuous, daring prose brilliantly exhibits Dunmore's "poet's ear for language and photographer's eye for images" (Newsday) and confirms The Guardian's claim that Dunmore is "an electrifying and original talent."

    To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author.

    She also introduces us to specific characters as well as 'types' who will appear and reappear in changing relationships as the years go by. There is the middle-aged woman centrally involved in the events and activities around her; here, Laura Morland, a happily widowed author of very successful 'good bad books' (Thirkell herself?). A disappointed suitor and/or a brief, ill-conceived infatuation of younger man with older woman. At least two romances to work out—an older couple and a younger one—with mild crises along the way. A closing of ranks among the women vs the intruder nicknamed 'the Incubus' resolves both affairs to the satisfaction of all. Especially delightful are the children, servants and other retainers; well defined characters in their own right; from motor-mouthed young Tony Morland and his model railways to housekeeper Stoker and her grapevine among the servants of the neighbourhood.

    In this compelling story of love, deception, obsession, and illusion, the arrival of two dangerous strangers in a small village in England in the early 1900s disrupts the quiet lives of a vicar with a fascination with spiritualism and his naïve young wife, and ultimately leads to murder. The Unseen is literary suspense at its most entertaining and enthralling, truly superior fiction not unlike the captivating tales of Kate Morton and Diane Setterfield.

    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

    A collection of three of the author's "Discworld" novels; "Equal Rites", "Wyrd Sisters" and "Witches Abroad", that feature the characters Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrit Garlick.

    Comic-book artist Gil Kane illustrates Richard Wagner's four Ring operas in a graphic style which makes music all its own.