Banished to the Empire’s farthest outpost, veteran warrior Paulinus Maximus defends The Wall of Britannia from the constant onslaught of belligerent barbarian tribes. Bravery, loyalty, experience, and success lead to Maximus’ appointment as “General of the West” by the Roman emperor, the ambition of a lifetime. But with the title comes a caveat: Maximus needs to muster and command a single legion to defend the perilous Rhine frontier. On the opposite side of the Rhine River, tribal nations are uniting; hundreds of thousands mass in preparation for the conquest of Gaul, and from there, a sweep down into Rome itself. Only a wide river and a wily general keep them in check. With discipline, deception, persuasion, and surprise, Maximus holds the line against an increasingly desperate and innumerable foe. Friends, allies, and even enemies urge Maximus to proclaim himself emperor. He refuses, bound by an oath of duty, honor, and sacrifice to Rome, a city he has never seen. But then circumstance intervenes. Now, Maximus will accept the purple robe of emperor, if his scrappy legion can deliver this last crucial victory against insurmountable odds. The very fate of Rome hangs in the balance. Combining the brilliantly realized battle action of Gates of Fire and the masterful characterization of Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, Eagle in the Snow is nothing less than the novel of the fall of the Roman empire

Sir Damian Cray is a philanthropist, peace activist, and the world's most famous pop star. But still it's not enough. He needs more if he is to save the world. Trouble is, only Alex Rider recognizes that it's the world that needs saving from Sir Damian Cray. Underneath the luster of glamour and fame lies a twisted mind, ready to sacrifice the world for his beliefs. But in the past, Alex has always had the backing of the government. This time, he's on his own. Can one teenager convince the world that the most popular man on earth is a madman bent on destruction-before time runs out?

Seismologist Charlie Richter, grandson of the inventor of the Richter scale, knows earthquakes, and has a method for predicting them. Arriving in Los Angeles to begin work at the Center for Earthquake Studies, a mysterious agency that seems more Hollywood than science, Charlie settles into his new life. His only distraction from work is Grace, an assistant to a powerful producer, and her deadbeat scriptwriter boyfriend Ian. It's only a matter of time before Charlie sees the "Big One" looming on the horizon. When Charlie alerts his boss at the Center, he is the one that's in for a shock: this is exactly what the Center was hoping for. With the news leaked, everyone's suddenly looking to produce the next disaster blockbuster. One of the few scripts Ian actually wrote, Ear to the Ground, happens to be about an earthquake disaster, and soon it's plucked from obscurity and given the fast track. But with a little bit of luck, Charlie may just foil everybody's plans. He just needs explosives, a helicopter, a little more time. By award-winning writer and Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin, Ear to the Ground is a rollicking visit back to the 1990s

Bromfield takes a close look at the Pentlands - a fictional rich family in New England - exposing the hypocrisy and ignorance behind their luxurious facade. Bromfield's eloquence when describing both his characters and their surroundings is breathtaking, and his accuracy in describing the characters' complicated emotions makes it apparent that he knows human nature very well. A fascinating study on the struggle of one woman to escape the stifling influence of her husband and in-laws

The new standalone novel from Number 1 bestselling author Jasper Fforde. Every Winter, the human population hibernates. During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness, and devoid of human activity. Well, not quite. Your name is Charlie Worthing and it’s your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artefact borne of the sleeping mind. When the dreams start to kill people, it’s unsettling. When you get the dreams too, it’s weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity. But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren’t eaten by Nightwalkers whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk. But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you’ll be fine

Seventeen, dead, and in charge of heaven's dark angels—all itching to kill someone. Madison Avery's dreams of ever fitting in at her new school died when she did. Especially since she was able to maintain the illusion of a body, deal with a pesky guardian angel, and oh yeah, bring the reaper who killed her to his untimely end. Not exactly in-crowd material. It's amazing that her crush, Josh, doesn't think she's totally nuts. Now Madison has learned that she's the dark timekeeper, in charge of angels who follow the murky guidelines of fate. Never one to abide by the rules, she decides it's time for a major change to the system. With the help of some unlikely allies, Madison forms a rogue group of reapers who definitely don't adhere to the rules of the heavens. But as she grapples with the terrifying new skills that come with being a timekeeper, Madison realizes she may not be prepared for what lies ahead—unless she gets some seriously divine intervention

Название: Early Transformation Оригинал: Early_Transformation Автор оригинала: Healer Pomfrey Переводчик: Дочь_Снейпа (Группа «Переводчики-Слифорчики») Разрешение на перевод: Запрос отправлен Пейринг: ГП, семья Уизли Рейтинг: PG-13 Тип: Джен Жанр: Общий Размер: Мини Статус оригинала: Закончен Статус перевода: Закончен Отказ: Фанфик принадлежит Healer Pomfrey, герои — госпоже Роулинг Аннотация: Шестилетний Гарри Поттер внезапно превращается в кота и встречает младшее поколение представителей семейства Уизли. Джинни решает приютить котенка. Как долго Гарри будет скрывать правду? Предупреждение: AU

From the Pulitzer Prize winner: a journey through mid-century America, as lived by the extraordinary Langdon family we first met in Some Luck, a national best seller published to rave reviews from coast to coast.Early Warning opens in 1953 with the Langdons at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch Walter, who with his wife had sustained their Iowa farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children looking to the future. Only one will remain to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of postwar optimism through the Cold War, the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and '70s, and then into the unprecedented wealth — for some — of the early '80s, the Langdon children will have children of their own: twin boys who are best friends and vicious rivals; a girl whose rebellious spirit takes her to the notorious Peoples Temple in San Francisco; and a golden boy who drops out of college to fight in Vietnam — leaving behind a secret legacy that will send shockwaves through the Langdon family into the next generation. Capturing an indelible period in America through the lens of richly drawn characters we come to know and love, Early Warning is an engrossing, beautifully told story of the challenges — and rich rewards — of family and home, even in the most turbulent of times

The NSA's most lethal weapon is back. Code-named Devlin, he operates in the darkest recesses of the US government. When international cyber-terrorists allow a deadly and cunning band of radical insurgents to breach the highest levels of national security, Devlin must take down an enemy bent on destroying America – an enemy more violent and ruthless than the world has ever known

Weaving an epic of complex dimensions, David Brin plaits initially divergent story lines, all set in the year 2038, into an outstandingly satisfying novel. At the center is a type of mystery: after a failed murder attempt, a group of people try to save the victim, recover the murder weapon, identify the guilty party and fend off other assassins, all the while being led through n+1 plot twists — each with a sense of overhanging doom, because the intended victim is Gaea, Earth herself. The struggle to save the planet gives Brin the occasion to recap recent global events: a world war fought to wrest all caches of secret information from the grip of an elite few; a series of ecological disasters brought about by environmental abuse; and the effects of a universal interactive data network on beginning to turn the world into a true global village. Fully dimensional and engaging characters with plausible motivations bring drama to these scenarios. Brin’s exciting prose style will probably make this a Hugo nominee, and will certainly keep readers turning pages

Earth Abides is a 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer George R. Stewart. It tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and its rebirth. Beginning in the United States in the 1940s, it deals with Isherwood “Ish” Williams, Emma, and the community they founded. The survivors live off the remains of the old world, while learning to adapt to the new. Along the way they are forced to make tough decisions and choose what kind of civilization they will rebuild. Earth Abides won the inaugural International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was included in Locus Magazine’s list of best All Time Science Fiction in 1987 and 1998 and was a nominee to be entered into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. In November 1950, it was adapted for the CBS radio program Escape as a two-part drama starring John Dehner. The book earned much praise from James Sallis, writing in the Boston Globe: This is a book, mind you, that I’d place not only among the greatest science fiction but among our very best novels. Each time I read it, I’m profoundly affected, affected in a way only the greatest art—Ulysses, Matisse or Beethoven symphonies, say—affects me. Epic in sweep, centering on the person of Isherwood Williams, Earth Abides proves a kind of antihistory, relating the story of humankind backwards, from ever-more-abstract civilization to stone-age primitivism. Everything passes—everything. Writers’ reputations. The ripe experience of a book in which we find ourselves immersed. Star systems, worlds, states, individual lives. Humankind. Few of us get to read our own eulogies, but here is mankind’s. Making Earth Abides a novel for which words like elegiac and transcendent come easily to mind, a novel bearing, in critic Adam-Troy Castro’s words, “a great dark beauty.”

When the Soviet army arrives in Afghanistan, the elderly Dastaguir witnesses the destruction of his village and the death of his clan. His young grandson Yassin, deaf from the sounds of the bombing, is one of the few survivors. The two set out through an unforgiving landscape, searching for the coal mine where Murad, the old man’s son and the boy’s father, works. They reach their destination only to learn that they must wait and rely for help on all that remains to them: a box of chewing tobacco, some unripe apples, and the kindness of strangers. Haunting in its spareness, Earth and Ashes is a tale of devastating loss, but also of human perseverance in the face of madness and war. The devastation of Afghanistan during the Soviet war is succinctly and piercingly conveyed in Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi (trans. from the Persian by Erdag M. Goknar), a novella-length account of an old man’s futile journey. Dastaguir and his grandson Yassin wait beside a guard post on the road to the mine where Dastaguir’s son Murad works. The family’s village has been bombed, and everyone else in the family is dead; Yassin was deafened by the attack. While he waits for a ride to the mine, Dastaguir is visited by fantastic visions (“You find yourself standing on the branch of a jujube tree, stark naked”). The blasted dreamscape of Rahimi’s story and his tightly controlled prose make this a sobering literary testament to the horrors of war

“Earth and High Heaven” is, simply, a drama of human relationships — of two people in love who are confronted by the obstacle of racial intolerance — presented with such cutting truth, such fidelity to life, such compassion and understanding, that their problem becomes, indelibly, the reader’s own. With rare perceptiveness, Gwethalyn Graham takes the reader into the lives of Erica Drake and Marc Reiser, whose two worlds are separated by families and conventions. Here is the story of a man and woman who dared earth and high heaven to make their vision real

David Malouf once again shows us why he is one of Australia’s most enduring and respected writers. David Malouf’s new collection comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of ‘silence, following talk’ after its exploration of memory, imagination and mortality. With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on ‘this patch/of earth and its green things’, charting the resilience of beauty amidst stubborn human grace

18-year-old Jarra has a lot to prove. After being awarded one of the military’s highest honours for her role in a daring rescue attempt, Jarra finds herself – and her Ape status – in the spotlight. Jarra is one of the unlucky few born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Derided as an ‘ape’ – a ‘throwback’ – by the rest of the universe, Jarra is on a mission to prove that Earth Girls are just as good as anyone else. Except now the planet she loves is under threat by what could be humanity’s first ever alien contact. Jarra’s bravery – and specialist knowledge – will once again be at the centre of the maelstrom, but will the rest of the universe consider Earth worth fighting for?

His words alone could change the world—his words alone DID change the world. Was it mass hypnosis, a hex, or THE POWER? First published as “Of Godlike Power”

Welkin Quinn has always dreamed of setting foot on Earth. As an elite Skyborn teenager aboard a transport ship destined for Tau Ceti, all he knows of his home planet is what he has learned from the Elders as well as from a wealth of records and artifacts archived in the ship's memory. The creatures known as the Earthborn-brutish survivors of the devastation that laid waste to Earth-are an uncivilized and technologically primitive race in many ways indistinguishable from savages. Yet even though Welkin was born on The Colony, Earth is still. . . home. When The Colony is forced to abort its mission to colonize and Tau Ceti and crash lands on Earth, he will finally have a chance to experience Earth-and the Earthborn-firsthand. Assigned to a reconnaissance team to explore The Colony's perimeter, however, Welkin is ambushed by a murderous gang of feral Earthborn known as Jabbers. Welkin is rescued by Sarah, an Earthborn hardly older than himself and a leader of group of young survivors who are trying to unite other displaced families in a war against the Jabbers. No question Skyborn Welkin needs the help of these Earthborn to survive. The real question is, Why on earth would they need him?

Tavia Michaels is the sole survivor of the plane crash that killed her parents. When she starts to see strange visions of a boy she’s never spoken with in real life, she begins to suspect that there’s much about her past that she isn’t being told. Tavia immediately searches for answers, desperate to determine why she feels so drawn to a boy she hardly knows. But when Tavia discovers that the aunt and uncle who took her in after her parents' death may have actually been responsible for the plane crash that killed them--and that she may have been the true intended victim--she flees for the safety of Camden, Maine, where the boy she sees in her visions instructs her to go. Now, Tavia is on the run with no one to trust. No one, that is, except for her best friend and longtime crush, Benson. Tavia feels torn between the boy who mysteriously comes to her at night and the boy who has been by her side every step of the way. But what Tavia doesn't know is that the world is literally falling apart and that to save it she will have to unite with the boy in her visions. Only problem? To do so would mean rejecting Benson's love. And that's the one thing Tavia Michaels swore she'd never do

“One of science fiction’s most reliable practitioners” (San Francisco Chronicle) continues his saga of space exploration. The mysterious alien Others have prohibited humans from space travel-destroying Earth’s fleet of starships in a display of unimaginable power. Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way, using nineteenthcentury technology, to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them

The time: 200 years after man’s first landing on the Moon. There are permanent populations established on the Moon, Venus and Mars. Outer space inhabitants have formed a new political entity, the Federation, and between the Federation and Earth a growing rivalry has developed. Earthlight is the story of this emerging conflict

Tremendous historical novel of the early 1600s, as seen through the eyes of John Tradescant, gardener to the great men of the age. A traveller in a time of discovery, the greatest gardening pioneer of his day, yet a man of humble birth: John Tradescant’s story is a mirror to the extraordinary age in which he lives. As gardener and confidante to Sir Robert Cecil, Tradescant is well placed to observe the social and political changes that are about to sweep through the kingdom. While his master conjures intrigues at Court, Tradescant designs for him the magnificent garden at Hatfield, scouring the known world for ever more wonderful plants: new varieties of fruit and flower, the first horse chestnuts to be cultivated in England, even larches from Russia. Moving to the household of the flamboyant Duke of Buckingham, Tradescant witnesses at first hand the growing division between Parliament and the people; and the most loyal of servants must find a way to become an independent squire

"To read a novel by Anne Tyler is to fall in love." PEOPLE Charlotte Emory has always lived a quiet, conventional life in Clarion, Maryland. She lives as simply as possible, and one day decides to simplify everything and leave her husband. Her last trip to the bank throws Charlotte's life into an entirely different direction when a restless young man in a nylon jacket takes her hostage during the robbery-and soon the two are heading south into an unknown future, and a most unexpected fate…

Also published as Contact

Naples is an urban hive that has suffered many an earthquake over the centuries. The next such shakeup provides Domini with his premise. An American family, Jay and Barbara Lulucita and their five children, are something like innocents abroad. In the naive belief that they can help, they come to this crime-riddled and quake-broken city, which in recent years has also suffered another upheaval, namely, the impact of the illegal immigrants pouring in from Africa. There’s a child faith-healer, rather a New Age version of the classic Catholic figure. There’s an unnerving NATO officer, forever in the same outfit yet forever in disguise. Earthquake I.D. renders an Italy complex and exact

Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the City of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists' colony. In the hands of T. Coraghessan Boyle, praised by Digby Diehl in Playboy as "one of the most exciting young fiction writers in America," the result is a sexy, hilarious tragicomedy of thwarted expectations and mistaken identity, love, jealousy, and betrayal

The third book in "The Brentford Trilogy", following on from "The Antipope" and "The Brentford Triangle". Once again it features the further adventures of Jim Pooley, John Omally, and all the regulars at the Flying Swan

When the council that controlled the world spanning computer Mother fell out in civil war, it plunged the world in an instant from high-tech utopia to medieval nightmare. Now Herzer Herrick and Megan Trevante have been assigned the mission to capture the spaceship that supplies the fuel for the whole world. Given that Herzer vaguely thinks orbital decay is something having to do with teeth it should be… interesting. With all the usual combat expected in a John Ringo novel, East of the Sun and West of the Moon sheds new light on the bizarre relationship between Herzer and Megan, the politics of the new born world and fascinating details of space technology

A brilliant debut from a rising talent praised by Salman Rushdie, among others. A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the waters of the river that divides their village into East and West. These are some of the strange, unexpectedly moving events in talented newcomer Miroslav Penkov's vision of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his extraordinary debut collection. In East of the West Penkov writes with great empathy about 800 years of tumult in troubled Eastern Europe; his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. But even as the characters wrestle with the weight of history, the debt to family, and the pangs of exile, the stories themselves are light and deft, animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd. In 2008, Salman Rushdie chose Penkov's story "Buying Lenin" (which appears in this collection) for that year's Best American Short Stories, citing its heart and humour. East of the West reveals the full realization of the brilliant potential that Rushdie recognized

Nobel winner Pearl S. Buck’s classic debut novel, about one Chinese woman’s coming of age as she’s torn between Eastern and Western cultures. Kwei-lan is a traditional Chinese girl — taught by her mother to submit in all things, “as a flower submits to sun and rain alike.” Her marriage was arranged before she was born. As she approaches her wedding day, she’s surprised by one aspect of her anticipated life: Her husband-to-be has been educated abroad and follows many Western ideas that Kwei-lan was raised to reject. When circumstances push the couple out of the family home, Kwei-lan finds her assumptions about tradition and modernity tested even further. East Wind: West Wind is a sensitive, early exploration of the cross-cultural themes that went on to become a hallmark of Buck’s acclaimed novels

The first thing you notice when reading Eastern Standard Tribe is that it suggests a methodology that Doctorow follows when building his novels: identify and research a cool new idea, add more and more cool bits to that idea, and then build that into a story. In Down and Out the cool idea was reputation-based economies, and in Tribe it's a new kind of social group emerging that chooses to abandon its local standard time to live and work in stop with another more desirable one... Damien Broderick, in a recent review, coined the rather amusing term "blogpunk," which seems to very much apply to Doctorow's work. It refers to the tendency of writers of online journals to accumulate fascinating factoids and then share them amongst themselves. And, to an extent, you can see that in Tribe. The novel's background is full of cool things — cars running on lard and such — but it's just that, background. At its heart, Tribe is a witty, sometimes acerbic poke in the eye at modern culture. Everything comes under Doctorow's microscope, and he manages to be both up to date and off the cuff in the best possible way. — Jonathan Strahan, Locus Magazine