Set among the apple orchards of rural Maine, it is a perverse world in which Homer Wells' odyssey begins. As the oldest unadopted offspring at St Cloud's orphanage, he learns about the skills which, one way or another, help young and not-so-young women, from Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder, a man of rare compassion with an addiction to ether. Dr Larch loves all his orphans, especially Homer Wells. It is Homer's story we follow, from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage, to his adult life running a cider-making factory and his strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend

Television producer Laurie Moran is delighted when the pilot for her reality drama, Under Suspicion, is a success. Even more, the program—a cold case series that revisits unsolved crimes by recreating them with those affected—is off to a fantastic start when it helps solve an infamous murder in the very first episode. Now Laurie has the ideal case to feature in the next episode ofUnder Suspicion: the Cinderella Murder. When Susan Dempsey, a beautiful and multi-talented UCLA student, was found dead, her murder raised numerous questions. Why was her car parked miles from her body? Had she ever shown up for the acting audition she was due to attend at the home of an up-and-coming director? Why does Susan’s boyfriend want to avoid questions about their relationship? Was her disappearance connected to a controversial church that was active on campus? Was she close to her computer science professor because of her technological brilliance, or something more? And why was Susan missing one of her shoes when her body was discovered? With the help of lawyer and Under Suspicion host Alex Buckley, Laurie knows the case will attract great ratings, especially when the former suspects include Hollywood’s elite and tech billionaires. The suspense and drama are perfect for the silver screen—but is Cinderella’s murderer ready for a close-up?

Nicholas is a would-be poet and video-store clerk with a weeping hole in his hand—weeping not blood, but a plasma of tears— “IT WANTS ME, NAKOTA. IT WANTS ME.” It began with Nakota and her crooked grin. She had to see the dark hole in the storage room down the hall. She had to make love to Nicholas beside it, and stare into its secretive, promising depths. Then Nakota began her experiments: First, she put an insect into the hole. Then a mouse… “REACH IN, NICHOLAS. REACH IN…” Now from down the hall, the black hole calls out to Nicholas every day and every night. And he will go to it. Because it has already seared his flesh, infected his soul, and started him on a journey of obsession—through its soothing, blank darkness into the blinding core of terror…

The Circle is set in the fashionable drawing room of Aston-Adey, the Champion-Cheneys’ house in Dorset. Maugham’s plot, which may be unfamiliar, contains two triangles, each of a husband, wife, and lover. The first of these includes Clive, a cuckolded husband, Lady Kitty, his ex-wife, and Lord Porteous, her second husband. Thirty years before the start of the play, Lady Kitty ran off to Italy with Lord Porteous, leaving her husband and five-year-old son Arnold to their own devices. The play opens with the return of this now aged couple to England and a family reunion negotiated by Arnold’s curious wife. To complicate matters, the earlier abandoned husband Clive intrudes upon the visiting couple, losing no chance to wreak hilarious verbal havoc. The second triangle, one of young people, consists of the stuffy MP and furniture collector Arnold, his lively but bored wife, and their pleasing house guest Teddie. Bringing matters full circle, Elizabeth and Teddie have fallen for each other. The central concern of the play thus becomes whether they will bolt like the lovers of thirty years ago. Maugham’s hall of mirrors action wittily calls to mind the famous question: Do people learn anything from the past, or is the only lesson the past has to offer that people have never learned anything from it?

The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge

As the assistant to her father, the county coroner of Silverton, Colorado, Cameryn Mahoney gets to witness all aspects of death, including the autopsy room. Yet somehow that feels easy, compared to her personal life. Now that her long-lost mother has made a surprise return, Cameryn's more confused than ever. Things only get worse when she picks up a mysterious young hitch-hiker. Cameryn senses that the girl is running away from something, but before she can find out more, the girl is found dead-a gun in her hand. Is it suicide? Or something even more sinister? Mixing forensic details and ripped-from-the-headlines themes, Alane Ferguson makes her readers' hearts pound yet again with this edge-of-your seat forensic mystery!

A novel which traces the adventures of a young weaver called Alu, a child of extraordinary talent, from his home in an Indian village through the slums of Calcutta, to Goa and across the sea to Africa. By the author of THE SHADOW LINES

Рассказ вошёл в сборники: Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал) The October Country (Октябрьская страна) Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

At the awful dawn of a nuclear age-at the painful birth of the Cold War-the Citadel was constructed in secret beneath the Antarctic ice. Housing the most devastating weapon imaginable, it was a safeguard against an unseen threat far more potent than the growing Communist menace. Now, six decades later, America 's destruction seems all but assured-because the enemy has re-emerged from the shadows of time. And the Citadel has been breached. The commander of Section 8-a covert force of misfits assigned the impossible missions no one else will touch-Captain Jim Vaughn must now lead his unit into the unknown to diffuse a nightmare of astronomical proportions. The future hangs in the balance-and the ultimate survival of humankind is in the hands of men with nothing left to lose…

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique to break through Diaspar’s stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders

The horrific, unexpected terrorist attacks across the U.S. have exiled its citizens to refugee camps on the outskirts of major cities. As a result of worsening circumstances, their surroundings have become chaotic and unruly in the wake of destruction. Jim, a decorated former Navy analyst, has finally reunited with his sister, Samantha, and niece, Annie. Following their reunion, he can breathe a sigh of relief; if only for a moment. The saga continues as Jim discovers that brother-in-law is being held by the military for questioning about the terrorist attacks. Samantha is distraught over confinement of her husband as Jim finds himself called to duty for one more mission. Together with his friend, Coyle, and loyal cat, Tigs, they fight gangs, fire, and at times, each other as they race against the clock to hunt down their new unknown enemy. Download this exhilarating, must-read installment to find out just who you can trust when the world around you goes up in flames

• The Verge’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Book We’re Looking Forward to in 2019 • AV Club’s 15 Most Anticipated Books of 2019 • Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 • Kirkus’ 30 Speculative Fiction Books You Should Read in February 2019 • Bookish’s Winter’s Must-Read Sci-fi & Fantasy • Bookbub’s Best Science Fiction Books Coming Out in 2019 • YA Books Central’s Buzzworty Books of 2019

From the author of The Death of Vishnu, “a big, pyrotechnic… ambitious… ingenious” (Wall Street Journal) novel. Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight. Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz—cocky, handsome, and glib. “The Jazter,” as he calls himself, is Muslim, but his true religion has steadfastly been sex with men. Dodging danger at every step, both he and Sarita are inexorably drawn to Devi ma, the patron goddess who has reputedly appeared in person to save her city. What they find will alter their lives more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come. A wickedly comedic and fearlessly provocative portrayal of individuals balancing on the sharp edge of fate, The City of Devi brilliantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, and sex, and offers a terrifying yet exuberant glimpse of the end of the world

‘Where Itäranta shines is in her understated but compelling characters.’ Emmi Itäranta’s prose combines the lyricism of Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO. This is her second novel, following the award-winning MEMORY OF WATER. The tapestry of life may be more fragile than it seems: pull one thread, and all will unravel. In the City of Woven Streets, human life has little value. You practice a craft to keep you alive, or you are an outcast, unwanted and tainted. Eliana is a young weaver in the House of Webs, but secretly knows she doesn’t really belong there. She is hiding a shameful birth defect that would, if anyone knew about it, land her in the House of the Tainted, a prison for those whose very existence is considered a curse. When an unknown woman with her tongue cut off and Eliana’s name tattooed on her skin arrives at the House of Webs, Eliana discovers an invisible network of power behind the city’s facade. All the while, the sea is clawing the shores and the streets are slowly drowning. Emmi Itäranta’s second novel was published as The City of Woven Streets on June 2nd 2016 in the UK by by HarperVoyager. The US version, titled The Weaver, will follow in November 2016

A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that’s not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can’t quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he’s just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it’s not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps. They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it’s the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he’d prefer to ignore. In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others