Part of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers by Hugh Cook is a strong action-orientated standalone novel that accomplishes several things that the other books were not able to. There is a certain air of familiarity here; the book presents a fairly straightforward plot, sticks to it, and offers plenty of swordfights, mystery, and humor throughout it. The Women and the Warlords and The Wizards and the Warriors both seemed to lose focus midway through, teetering on the edge of uncertainty, but not here.The story follows a red-skinned Ebrell Islander named Chegory Guy as he explores the neighboring city. It has fallen victim to a massive energy drain and the recent theft of its precious wishstone has caused everyone with a knife to be questioned. There is also a pseudo-political struggle for power while demons run amuck, possessing others at will.Cook manages to create a diverse cast, each with just enough personality to make them memorable. Personal favorites were Empress Justina, Uckermark, and Chegory Guy himself. He makes for a simple hero, always having to make decisions between what is better for the city or better for him. He’s still a rambunctious youngster, but manages to grow up a decent amount during the novel’s time.And gone are the awkward dictionary entries at the beginning of chapters. Instead, we have a slew of editors and fact checkers inserting notes or deleting paragraphs of text as they please. It’s not as strange as it sounds, and actually adds a lot of flavor to the story, making it seem much more real than it could possibly be.

Guaradian award winning novel about courage, friendship and war. Reissued into the Essential Modern Classic list.When a bomb during an air raid destroys Harry's home and kills his family, he knows that he is all alone in the world and has only himself to rely on. Anxious that he will be sent to live with his fussy Cousin Elsie he goes on the run across the war-battered land of North East England, his only friend in his journey a stray dog that he meets on the beach. Will Harry ever find a place to call home again, or will he be on the run forever?

Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.Amazon.com ReviewI cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a . . . thick, slow discharge I recognized as blood. A wry, mesmerizing tale of madness in a London suffused with the smells of jellied eels, leaking gas, outdoor lavatories and furry feet. Spider obsesses about wetness and fire and sexuality, about "this business of the thought patterns" and "the dead eyes" of his father and a woman named Hilda. Somewhere inside Spider's internal web of illusions lurks the truth about his mother's death. From Publishers WeeklyIn this "closely observed study of madness, memory and storytelling" the delusional Dennis Clegg, aka Spider, returns to his London neighborhood after 20 years in a mental hospital and insists that his father, not he, murdered his mother. "An admixture of Poe and the comic vulnerabilities of Beckett, this tale lingers long and disturbingly in the mind," said PW.

This is the novel that inspired one of the most famous movies about divorce ever made, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Oliver and Barbara Rose are a passionate couple who meet at a Cape Cod auction while bidding for matching figurines. The figurines belong together, and so do the Roses. Their perfect love, complete with dream home and wonderful children, is fated to disintegrate, however, and when Oliver collapses in an apparent heart attack, Barbara’s indifference brings the true state of their marriage out into the open. The war they wage against each other eventually descends into brutality and madness, as they destroy each other’s most prized possessions and spiral into chaos. The global impact of both the book and the movie has brought the phrase ‘The War of the Roses’ into the popular jargon describing the terrible hatred and cruelty engendered in divorce proceedings. The Roses’ bereft children are featured in the novel’s sequel, The Children of the Roses . FB2Library.Elements.CiteItem FB2Library.Elements.CiteItem FB2Library.Elements.CiteItem

With Inos married to the wrong man and Rap dying in a dungeon, obviously the cause is hopeless. Only Aunt Kade refuses to admit defeat . . .

For six centuries the Republic of Venice was a maritime empire, its sovereign power extending throughout much of the eastern Mediterranean - an empire of coasts, islands and isolated fortresses by which, as Wordsworth wrote, the mercantile Venetians 'held the gorgeous east in fee'. Jan Morris reconstructs the whole of this glittering dominion in the form of a sea-voyage, travelling along the historic Venetian trade routes from Venice itself to Greece, Crete and Cyprus. It is a traveller's book, geographically arranged but wandering at will from the past to the present, evoking not only contemporary landscapes and sensations but also the characters, the emotions and the tumultuous events of the past. The first such work ever written about the Venetian 'Stato da Mar', it is an invaluable historical companion for visitors to Venice itself and for travellers through the lands the Doges once ruled.

SUMMARY: 'This thrilling book is the first occasion on which early Byzantine history has been rendered both readable and credible' - Independent. 'He is brilliant . . . He writes like the most cultivated modern diplomat attached by a freak of time to the Byzantine court, with intimate knowledge, tactful judgement and a consciousness of the surviving monuments' - Independent. 'Lord Norwich's skill is to communicate . . . the humanity of his subject - the human faces of emperor and priest - and to transmit his own imaginative interest to ourselves . . . Lord Norwich has appeared as a silver-tongued Virgil to guide us through Tartarian regions with the amenity and amusement of a luxury tour' - Sunday Times. 'The reader is conveyed in comfort, as it were in a very superior hovercraft, which glides smoothly over all the unevenness of the ground, to the regular, melodious sound of the author's prose' - Sunday Telegraph.

In the first collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers more about some of the people from Lake Wobegon Days and introduces some new faces. "Leaving Home is a book of exceptional charm . . . delightful . . . genuinely touching" —The Wall Street Journal "Clean, down-to-earth, exquisitely good hearted, highly ludicrous." —The New York Times

A searing tale of a young woman discovering her troubled family history and cultural pastDottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history – or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain.At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs. Building on her fragmented, tantalising memories, she begins to clear a path through life, gradually gathering the confidence to take risks, to forge friendships and to challenge the labels that have been forced upon her.

With the world in crisis and the Superpowers moving towards confrontation, a UK city is trying to maintain order during a nuclear emergency. Civil rights are suspended and Martin Goodman, a man with a violent secret is put in charge. But unknown to Goodman, he too is under scrutiny. 

Castle Perilous is still tottering from last year's battle with the Hosts of Hell, and regaining stability proves a hard balancing act. Before Jeremy can design a program to calm the tremors of the universe, an alternative wicked reality appears that threatens to topple everything! Castle P. must face its evil twin, replete with its own dastardly doppleganger army-with the shadow self ensues as Good and Evil battle it out in the 144,000th dimension!