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Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, Abandoned by her rebellious mother when she was an infant, she was the only child of a rich man already in his mid-fifties when she was born, and her adoring father thoroughly spoiled her. Now, at thirty-two, having had many scrapes with the law, she is about to be released on probation from the California Institution for Women, having served twenty-two months of a four-year sentence for embezzlement. Though Nord Lafferty could deny his daughter nothing, he wasn't there for her when she was brought up on this charge. Now he wants to be sure she stays straight, stays at home and away from drugs, the booze, the gamblers.

It seems a straightforward assignment for Kinsey: babysit Reba until she settles in, make sure she follows all the niceties of her parole. May a week's work. Nothing untoward – the woman seems remorseful and friendly. And the money is good.

But life is never that simple, and Reba is out of prison less than twenty-four hours when one of her old crowd comes circling around.

Rabbit, now in his 50s and with a heart condition, is living in a condo in Florida. Nelson and his family come to stay and disaster unfolds. Rabbit has a serious heart attack after a boating accident with his granddaughter and Nelson has been embezzling the family firm to feed his cocaine habit.

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Amazon.com Review

It's 1989, and Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom feels anything but restful. In fact he's frozen, incapacitated by his fear of death-and in the final year of the Reagan era, he's right to be afraid. His 55-year-old body, swollen with beer and munchies and racked with chest pains, wears its bulk "like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one." He suspects that his son Nelson, who's recently taken over the family car dealership, is embezzling money to support a cocaine habit.

Indeed, from Rabbit's vantage point-which alternates between a winter condo in Florida and the ancestral digs in Pennsylvania, not to mention a detour to an intensive care unit-decay is overtaking the entire world. The budget deficit is destroying America, his accountant is dying of AIDS, and a terrorist bomb has just destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. This last incident, with its rapid transit from life to death, hits Rabbit particularly hard:

Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bring the clinking drinks caddy… and then with a roar and giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurized hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them.

Marching through the decades, John Updike's first three Rabbit novels-Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981)-dissect middle-class America in all its dysfunctional glory. Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final installment and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, continues this brilliant dissection. Yet it also develops Rabbit's character more fully as he grapples with an uncertain future and the consequences of his past. At one point, for example, he's taken his granddaughter Judy for a sailing expedition when his first heart attack strikes. Rabbit gamely navigates the tiny craft to shore-and then, lying on the beach, feels a paradoxical relief at having both saved his beloved Judy and meeting his own death. (He doesn't, not yet.) Meanwhile, this all-American dad feels responsible for his son's full-blown drug addiction but incapable of helping him. (Ironically, it's Rabbit's wife Janice, the "poor dumb mutt," who marches Nelson into rehab.)

His misplaced sense of responsibility-plus his crude sexual urges and racial slurs-can make Rabbit seems less than lovable. Still, there's something utterly heroic about his character. When the end comes, after all, it's the Angstrom family that refuses to accept the reality of Rabbit's mortality. Only Updike's irreplaceable mouthpiece rises to the occasion, delivering a stoical, one-word valediction: "Enough."

The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last – until his son, Nelson, returns from the West, and the image of an old love pays a visit to his lot. New characters and old populate these scenes from Rabbit's middle age, as he continues to pursue, in his erratic fashion, the rainbow of happiness.

The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves – or further complicates – his problems, makes for a novel of the first order.

Rabbit Redux is the second of five John Updike Rabbit novels, all of which focus on their central character Harry Angstrom. In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom – known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters – finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, Janice. How he resolves or further complicates his problems makes for a novel of the first order. The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, and sexy story.

The stunning novella that concludes John Updike's acclaimed Rabbit series is now available on audio.

Set 10 years after Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's death, Rabbit Remembered returns listeners to the small Pennsylvania town where Harry's widow, Janice, and his son, Nelson, still reside. They are faced with a surprise when Annabelle, Harry's 39-year-old illegitimate daughter, arrives on the scene, bringing with her ghosts from the past.

Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run–from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....

From the Publisher

I read Rabbit, Run when I was in high school (and it wasn't even a school assignment!). Twenty years later (at least!), three very vivid scenes from that book still pop into my head from time to time. The first is the used-car lot, where Rabbit Angstrom, the former basketball star, works for his father-in-law. The second scene is in a very red Chinese restaurant that had changed over from a French restaurant only the week before. Rabbit is there with his old coach and two women that are not their wives, and they drink daiquiris and whiskey sours. This restaurant could have been (and was) in my small town. The third scene is the most harrowing, and I've repeated it as a cautionary tale to young mothers for years, telling the story as if it had happened to someone I know. Janice, Rabbit's wife, who slugs alcohol throughout her pregnancy, is drunk and bathing her newborn baby when something terrible happens. I won't ruin it by telling you more. I read hundreds of books a year, both for my job and for pleasure, so the fact that parts of this book are so indelibly etched in my mind is a testament to the talent and genius of John Updike.

P.S. all of the other books in the Rabbit series are equally unforgettable.

–Maureen O'Neal

Über fünfzig Jahre quälte sich Peter Wawerzinek mit der Frage, warum seine Mutter ihn als Waise in der DDR zurückgelassen hatte. Dann fand und besuchte er sie. Das Ergebnis ist ein literarischer Sprengsatz, wie ihn die deutsche Literatur noch nicht zu bieten hatte.

Ihre Abwesenheit war das schwarze Loch, der alles verschlingende Negativpol in Peter Wawerzineks Leben. Wie hatte seine Mutter es ihm antun können, ihn als Kleinkind in der DDR zurückzulassen, als sie in den Westen floh? Der Junge, herumgereicht in verschiedenen Kinderheimen, blieb stumm bis weit ins vierte Jahr, mied Menschen, lauschte lieber den Vögeln, ahmte ihren Gesang nach, auf dem Rücken liegend, tschilpend und tschirpend. Die Köchin des Heims wollte ihn adoptieren, ihr Mann wollte das nicht. Eine Handwerkerfamilie nahm ihn auf, gab ihn aber wieder ans Heim zurück.

Wo war Heimat? Wo seine Wurzeln? Wo gehörte er hin?

Dass er auch eine Schwester hat, erfuhr er mit vierzehn. Im Heim hatte ihm niemand davon erzählt, auch später die ungeliebte Adoptionsmutter nicht. Als Grenz sol dat unternahm er einen Fluchtversuch Richtung Mutter in den Westen, kehrte aber, schon jenseits des Grenzzauns, auf halbem Weg wieder um. Wollte er sie, die ihn ausgestoßen und sich nie gemeldet hatte, wirk lich wiedersehen?

Zeitlebens kämpfte Peter Wawerzinek mit seiner Mutterlosigkeit. Als er sie Jahre nach dem Mauerfall aufsuchte und mit ihr die acht Halbgeschwister, die alle in derselben Kleinstadt lebten, war das über die Jahrzehnte überlebens groß gewordene Mutterbild der Wirklichkeit nicht gewachsen. Es blieb bei der einzigen Begegnung. Aber sie löste — nach jahrelanger Veröffentlichungspause — einen Schreibschub bei Peter Wawerzinek aus, in dem er sich das Trauma aus dem Leib schrieb: Über Jahre hinweg arbeitete er wie besessen an Rabenliebe, übersetzte das lebenslange Gefühl von Verlassenheit, Verlorenheit und Muttersehnsucht in ein großes Stück Literatur, das in der deutschsprachigen Literatur seinesgleichen noch nicht hatte.

Taylor and Carl Mitchell are brothers who have taken wildly divergent paths in life. But when a mysterious virus transforms most of the Earth’s population into bloodthirsty lunatics, they must learn to trust each other and work together in a dangerous new world where the slightest misstep could lead to the ultimate consequence.

The brothers must face their innermost fears and confront loss as they try to survive the long journey home. But will anyone be there waiting for them?

Sometimes there isn’t a happy ending.

Los inolvidables personajes de esta novela, como la entrañable y desgarrada pareja formada por el adolescente David y su perro Chispa, el enamorado inspector Galván, o Rosa Bartra, la hermosa pelirroja embarazada, obedecen a una tristeza y una estafa histórica muy concretas, pero también a la estafa eterna de los sueños, encarnada aquí por las fantasmales apariciones de un padre libertario fugitivo y de un arrogante piloto de la RAF que, desde la vieja fotografía de una revista colgada en la pared, actúa como confidente del fantasioso David.

Con estos personajes, con un lenguaje directo y translúcido que contrasta con la honda carga emotiva y moral que discurre por debajo de la trama, Rabos de lagartija, dotada de una estructura narrativa tan sabia como imaginativa, y mostrando cuán frágiles y ambiguos son los límites entre la realidad y la ficción, la verdad y la mentira, el Bien y el Mal, el amor y el desamor, corrobora la condición de Juan Marsé como uno de los novelistas mayores, no sólo de las Letras Hispanas, sino de las actuales narrativas europeas.

The Colton Points of View Collection

This novella is for the devoted readers of the Driven series. It is recommended that this companion be read after Driven, Fueled, and Crashed.

Największym atutem "Rachatłukum" jest niewątpliwie główny bohater, który do końca pozostaje bezimienny, właściwie anonimowy. Przez całą książkę opowiada nam o miłości swojego życia – rudowłosej Oldze. Właściwie powieść nie ma wątków pobocznych, jedynie drobne epizody. Jeśli jednak ktoś myśli, że to kolejna mdła, romantyczna paplanina, jest w sporym błędzie. Wolkers operuje językiem jakby nieprzystającym do tej tematyki. Obrzydliwym i obscenicznym, właściwie momentami wulgarnym, gdyż po prostu ta…

Без злого вампира Бишопа, правящего Морганвиллем, местные вампиры добились больших уступок для человеческой популяции. Клер Денверс и ее друзья почти начинают чувствовать себя комфортно со вновь обретенной свободой.

Теперь Клэр действительно может сосредоточиться на учебе, а ее подруга Ева присоединиться к местной театральной труппе. Но когда один из сослуживцев Евы пропадает без вести после начала съемок короткометражного документального фильма, Ева подозревает худшее. Клер и Ева скоро поймут, что этот фильм, который вампиры снимают сами про себя — намного больше — и намного опаснее, чем кто-либо предполагал.

Перевод — http://notabenoid.com/book/11538/

When Rachel arrives in Cougar Falls for a reading of her aunt’s will, she finds herself in a typical mountain town. Except that it’s not quite…typical. It’s full of the requisite, rough-hewn mountaineers, but these men seem more animal than man.

And one of the rude strangers brings out the animal in her during an embarrassingly orgasmic-and scorching-sexual encounter in an alley. The fantastic tales that the townsfolk tell about the Ac-Taw, a clan of people who can shift into animals, are nothing but folklore. Or are they?

Burke is stunned by his response to Rachel, and even more so when she innocently shows signs of possessing Ac-Taw blood. And this puts her in more danger than she knows, danger that only increases the urgency to mark her as his own.

Rachel comes to realize she’s inherited much more than just property. She has also inherited a destiny to protect her newfound home.

For the Ac-Taw aren’t just legend-they’re real

Is it truth or fiction? Memoir or essay? Narrative or associative? To a writer like Michael Martone, questions like these are high praise. Martone’s studied disregard of form and his unruffled embrace of the prospect that nothing-no story, no life-is ever quite finished have yielded some of today’s most splendidly unconventional writing. Add to that an utter weakness for pop Americana and what Louise Erdrich has called a “deep affection for the ordinary,” and you have one of the few writers who could pull off something like Racing in Place. Up the steps of the Washington Monument, down the home stretch at the Indy Speedway, and across the parking lot of the Moon Winx Lodge in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Martone chases, and is chased by, memories-and memories of memories. He writes about his grandfather’s job as a meter reader, those seventies-era hotels with atrium lobbies and open glass elevators, and the legendary temper of basketball coach Bob Knight.Martone, as Peter Turchi has said, looks “under stones the rest of us leave unturned.” So, what is he really up to when he dwells on the make of Malcolm X’s eyeglasses or the runner-up names for Snow White’s seven dwarfs? In “My Mother Invents a Tradition,” Martone tells how his mom, as the dean of girls at a brand-new high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, “constructed a nostalgic past out of nothing.” Sitting at their dining room table, she came up with everything from the school colors (orange and brown) to the yearbook title (Bear Tracks). Look, and then look again, Martone is saying. “You never know. I never know.”

In 2319 a damaged war veteran and a sociopathic geneticist find themselves facing a terrifying plague and a vengeful android left over from a devastating war. As desperation mounts to halt the disease, one question arises: what will have the higher body count, the virus or the doctor?

Cover art by oliviaprodesign

Riley Bloom left her sister, Ever, in the world of the living and crossed the bridge into the afterlife — a place called Here, where time is always Now. Riley and her dog, Buttercup, have been reunited with her parents and are just settling into a nice, relaxing death when she's summoned before The Council. They let her in on a secret — the afterlife isn't just an eternity of leisure; Riley has to work. She's been assigned a job, Soul Catcher, and a teacher, Bodhi, a curious boy she can't quite figure out. Riley, Bodhi, and Buttercup return to earth for her first assignment, a Radiant Boy who's been haunting a castle in England for centuries. Many Soul Catchers have tried to get him to cross the bridge and failed. But he's never met Riley…

The protagonist of this Explorer Corps adventure is Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. The name is supposed to bring her luck, but since she is quickly contaminated by a red fungus known as the Balrog, one has to wonder. Then she, Admiral Festina Ramos, and a slightly mad fellow named Tut are assigned to a rescue mission on the planet Muta. There, an entire expedition from the unit has been turned into gas clouds that give out electromagnetic pulses, and it looks as if this is the result of a deadly defense mechanism left behind by an alien race. It takes ingenuity and suffering to discover the mystery behind the pulses. The sheer complexity of Gardner’s characters and inventions will make the book daunting to a good many, but his ingenuity and wit will keep a good many others reading voraciously.

After a showdown with the notorious Yemeni terrorist known as The Panther, John Corey has left the Anti-Terrorist Task Force and returned home to New York City, taking a job with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group. Although Corey’s new assignment with the DSG-surveilling Russian diplomats working at the U.N. Mission-is thought to be “a quiet end,” he is more than happy to be out from under the thumb of the FBI and free from the bureaucracy of office life.

But Corey realizes something the U.S. government doesn’t: The all-too-real threat of a newly resurgent Russia.

When Vasily Petrov, a colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service posing as a diplomat with the Russian U.N. Mission, mysteriously disappears from a Russian oligarch’s party in Southampton, it’s up to Corey to track him down. What are the Russians up to and why? Is there a possible nuclear threat, a so-called radiant angel? Will Corey find Petrov and put a stop to whatever he has planned before it’s too late? Or will Corey finally be outrun and outsmarted, with America facing the prospect of a crippling attack unlike anything it’s ever seen before?

Prescient and chilling. DeMille’s new novel takes us into the heart of a new Cold War with a clock-ticking plot that has Manhattan in its crosshairs.

A girl’s 11th birthday always brings big changes to her world, but for Katya Dubko, it is truly the end of the world as she knows it. In the northern Ukraine, an area of dense forests, abundant wild life, and sparkling rivers, Katya’s little village of Yanov has been a fairytale home. Her family life is rich with ancient traditions and magical beliefs, and her father has a good job working for the government at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, a complex bigger than her whole village.

Steeped in the imagery of her people, Katya believes that the station is a magical factory, and she looks for men in white robes, the angels she has heard push buttons to create electricity. When she asks her father about the station, he reassures her that it is safe: “so safe I would let you and Mama sleep there. I’d let a baby sleep there.” Yet when Katya is sent into the forest to play while her family prepares her birthday dinner, she meets Vasyl, a mysterious otherworldly boy who tells her the agonizing truth: her world will be destroyed in an explosion. What is she to believe?

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, and the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the extent of the disaster. As Katya struggles to survive in the aftermath, Vasyl reenters her life and helps her to realize that there can be no healing without truth, however difficult it may be to face. As she reconnects with her friends from before the explosion, she begins to learn more about the scientific concepts that have changed their world, and she discovers that blind patriotism like her father’s can be the undoing of a country as well as a man. With the help of friends she could have never imagined in her old life, Katya begins to understand that the things that are most important about her homeland and herself have survived the disaster. Combining the mythological truths of her ancestors with an understanding of the science behind the Chernobyl explosion, Katya finds the strength to fulfill a promise she made to herself many years before. And from her new vantage point she realizes that she is no longer the little girl in the fairy tale, she has become the author of her own story.

Radiant Girl weaves history, fantasy, photographs and illustrations together to create a fictional coming of age tale that offers readers insight on surviving the powerful forces of change that rock their own lives, both from within and without.

Peter Higgins’s superb and original creation, a perfect melding of fantasy, myth, SF and political thriller, reaches its extraordinary conclusion.

The Vlast stands two hundred feet tall, four thousand tons of steel ready to be flung upwards on the fire of atom bombs. Ready to take the dream of President-Commander of the New Vlast General, Osip Rizhin, beyond the bounds of this world.

But not everyone shares this vision. Vissarion Lom and Maroussia Shaumian have not reached the end of their story, and in Mirgorod a woman in a shabby dress carefully unwraps a sniper rifle. And all the while the Pollandore dreams its own dreams.

ORBIT HOSPITAL ist ein Klinikum im All, das allen raumfahrenden Lebensformen der Galaxis medizinische Hilfe leistet. Es nimmt alle Geschöpfe auf, ob sie ein Dutzend Gliedmaßen haben oder gar keine, ob sie sich von Radioaktivität ernähren oder Wasser atmen — von anderen exotischen Gewohnheiten und Bedürfnissen ganz zu schweigen. Es ist ein ökologisches Tollhaus und ein organisatorischer Irrwitz, aber es ist für alle da und es funktioniert. Es ist im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes — lebensnotwendig.

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to ’33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin’s thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated “Enlightenment for Children” youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.

Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century’s most respected thinkers.

Wyklęty paleontolog Mitch Rafelson odkrywa w Alpach w spoczywające od dziesiątków tysięcy lat w nieznanej jaskini ciała rodziny neandertalczyków. Biolog molekularna Kaye Lang uważa, że w DNA człowieka, niby śpiący rycerze z legend, skrywają się pradawne choroby, które miliony lat czekają tylko na wezwanie, aby móc znowu zarażać i zabijać.

I w bardzo niedalekiej przyszłości, budzą się demony, z naszego genomu wyłania wirus, którego nazwa przypomina imię indyjskiego boga śmierci, Śiwy. Ludzkości zagraża zagłada, gdyż wirus powoduje poronienia u wszystkich zarażonych kobiet. Władze podejmują radykalne środki, dochodzi do zamieszek, prześladowań kobiet. Nieliczni, w tym Lang i Rafelson, w zagrożeniu widzą nadzieję, w chorobie, bólu, przemocy dostrzegają bóle porodowe ludzkości, które poprzedzają ogromny skok ewolucyjny, przyjście na świat nowego człowieka. Prześladowani i potępiani, ścigają się z czasem, aby rozwiązać największą zagadkę w dziejach rodu ludzkiego i powstrzymać oszalały świat.

Arcydzieło wysoko naukowej fantastyki autorstwa zdobywcy nagrody Nebula, według wielu krytyków najlepsza książka SF w USA w roku 1999. Prawdziwy, przedstawiony z ogromnym rozmachem i wnikliwością obraz nauki i nas, ludzi, postawio-nych przed obliczem być może największego zagrożenia w jej dziejach.

The author’s own sojourn in Prague’s smoke-filled bars and decaying streets led to his eerie tale of… Radio Praha.

With swift, bold and powerful writing, debut author Alison Littman tells the story of a family ripped apart by revolution, illuminating a time when news, rock ‘n’ roll and underground journalism forever changed the lives of those living behind the Iron Curtain.

After years of suffering under the communist regime in Cold War Hungary, Eszter Turján—fanatical underground journalist—would sacrifice anything, and anyone, to see the government fall. When she manipulates news broadcasts on Radio Free Europe, she ignites a vicious revolution, commits a calamitous murder and is dragged away screaming to a secret underground prison.

Her daughter Dora, then a teenager, cowers in her bedroom as the secret police arrest her mother. Haunted and hurt, Dora vows to work against everything Eszter believes in. But, it’s not that simple.

After nine years, Dora meets a strapping young fan of Radio Free Europe and is unwittingly drawn back into Eszter’s circle. She finds her mother, driven mad by years of torture, is headed for death.

On the brink of losing Eszter again, Dora must decide if she should risk her life to save the mother who discarded her—or leave it to fate.

Radio Underground is a beautiful, relevant novel that explores the lengths and limits of love, family and the power of expression.

El novio de Carla ha sido acusado de asesinato. Todas las pruebas le incriminan, pero ella cree en su inocencia y decide emprender una investigación para dar con el auténtico culpable.

During China's collectivist era in the late 1950s, a rural work team responsible for building an important floodgate receives a strange new recruit: Hei-hai, a skinny, silent and almost feral boy. Assigned to assist the blacksmith at the worksite forge, Hei-hai proves superhumanly indifferent to pain or suffering and yet, eerily sensitive to the natural world. As the worksite becomes a backdrop to jealousy and strife, Hei-hai's eyes remain fixed on a world that only he can see, searching for wonders that only he understands. One day, he finds all that he has been seeking embodied in the most mundane and unexpected way: a radish.

'That dark-skinned boy with the superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity represents the soul of my entire fictional output. Not one of all the fictional characters I've created since then is as close to my soul as he is.' Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

'Pungent, potent, absurd, moving, and alive, this early Mo Yan novella carries his unmistakable stamp. Survival is ignoble, and power blunt, but glimpses of the transcendent are possible: Radish captures the human condition with aching force.' Gish Jen, author of Mona in the Promised Land

Five hundred years after a handful of human starship travelers got lost in a hostile universe, their descendants are still struggling for survival. As hard as life is on The Raft — a platform remnant of the ship’s hull — it’s even harder in The Belt — a string of shacks circling the iron-rich core of a dead star. Every Belter has heard the story of the legendary starship but most of them don’t believe it. But Rees, a lowly mine-rat, does. He wonders why the sky is angry red instead of the blue his parents remembered. Why food from The Raft gets less and less nutritious. Why fewer and fewer stars form every day. In his quest to find answers, Rees travels from boyhood to manhood, from the outermost edges of his world into its mysterious heart. And along the way he discovers there’s more at stake than his simple curiosity: life in his enigmatic universe is about to become impossible…

The Benevolent Satrapy rule an empire of forty-eight worlds, linked by thousands of wormholes strung throughout the galaxy. Human beings, while technically “free,” mostly skulk around the fringes of the Satrapy, struggling to get by. The secretive alien Satraps tightly restrict the technological development of the species under their control. Entire worlds have been placed under interdiction, cut off from the rest of the universe.

Descended from the islanders of lost Earth, the Ragamuffins are pirates and smugglers, plying the lonely spaceways around a dead wormhole. For years, the Satraps have tolerated the Raga, but no longer. Now they have embarked on a campaign of extermination, determined to wipe out the unruly humans once and for all.

But one runaway woman may complicate their plans. Combat enabled, Nashara is more machine than flesh, and she carries inside her a doomsday weapon that could reduce the entire galaxy to chaos. A hunted fugitive, she just wants to get…

The Nazi Civil War rages on…

The Provisional Government has scored a significant victory, driving the Waffen-SS back from Berlin and winning itself time to plot a counteroffensive. But Karl Holliston — the self-declared Führer of the Greater German Reich — isn’t about to give up so easily. As mighty armies prepare for the final campaign, winter sweeps down from the east and both side prepare their ultimate weapons, the fate of the world hangs in the balance…

…And if the Reich burns, the rest of the world may burn too.

RAIBĀ VASARA

 Mirdza Kļava

They’re coming back to life…

The oldest secret order on earth has just woken up…

They want nothing less than the world…

They are the Hidden Hand…

The race is on to find an ancient power and stop the greatest sacrifice in history…

With the same high-octane pace and thrills of the Joe Hawke series, Raiders is an archaeological and historical action-adventure featuring a great new team and a terrible new enemy.

Former soldier Jed Mason is working as an asset recovery specialist — retrieving kidnapped people and stolen goods in a dog-eat-dog world of international crime, violence and ransoms. Nearly killed on a dangerous mission, he must deal with a terrible personal tragedy, but when a mysterious private consortium briefs him on a violent kidnapping he quickly discovers when one door shuts, another opens.

Why was the head of the Vatican’s secret archive murdered in Rome? Why was a leading American archaeologist snatched? Mason must lead his old team on a new adventure to stop a truly terrifying enemy intent on the sacrifice of millions.

Drawing on the same fast-paced action as the world of Joe Hawke, Raiders introduces a new series with an exciting and compelling band of brothers — and sisters — who must stand together in the face of adversity or die one by one.