Shadowland: Book III of the Brotherhood of the Conch

Shadowland: Book III of the Brotherhood of the Conch

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Literature & Fiction / Young Adult / Poetry

The hero of the Brotherhood of the Conch series, now fifteen, is settling back into his life as an apprentice in the lush Silver Valley, nestled high in the Himalayas. There he continues to learn the secret arts of the Brotherhood. But suddenly his adopted home is reduced to a barren wasteland when his beloved conch, the valley's source of magical energy, is stolen by an unknown force. Together with his friend Nisha, Anand embarks on what may be his most dangerous mission—traveling to the cold and forbidding world of Shadowland in his attempt to restore the conch to its rightful place, and his home to its original splendor. The third and final book in the series.
Read online
  • 974
Days Without End

Days Without End

Sebastian Barry

Fiction / Poetry

After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Having fled terrible hardships they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and imperilled when a young Indian girl crosses their path, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges, if only they can survive. Moving from the plains of the West to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past, Days Without End is a novel never to be forgotten.
Read online
  • 973
Mom & Me & Mom

Mom & Me & Mom

Maya Angelou

Biographies & Memoirs / Poetry

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them. Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.
Read online
  • 973
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Children's / Poetry / Fiction

You never know where you'll find yourself in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll! Join Alice in Wonderland, where nothing is quite as it seems. On an ordinary summer's afternoon, Alice tumbles down a hole and an extraordinary adventure begins. In a strange world with even stranger characters, she meets a grinning cat and a rabbit with a pocket watch, joins a Mad Hatter's Tea Party, and plays croquet with the Queen! Lost in this fantasy land, Alice finds herself growing more and more curious by the minute . . . With a wonderfully inspiring introduction by Chris Riddell, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is one of the twelve brilliant classic stories relaunched with a lovely new cover. PLUS A behind-the-scenes journey, including an author profile, a guide to who's who, activities and more... Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), grew up in Cheshire in the village of Daresbury, the son of a parish priest. He was a brilliant mathematician, a skilled photographer and a meticulous letter and diary writer. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, inspired by Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church in Oxford, was published in 1865, followed by Through the Looking-Glass in 1867. He wrote numerous stories and poems for children including the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark and fairy stories Sylvie and Bruno.
Read online
  • 973
The River and the Book

The River and the Book

Alison Croggon

Fantasy / Poetry / Young Adult

From the internationally bestselling author of The Books of Pellinor comes a powerful story about the exploitation of indigenous people by the First World. In Simbala's village they have two treasures: the River, which is their road and their god; and the Book, which is their history, their oracle and their soul. Simbala is a Keeper of the Book, the latest in a long line of women who can use it to find answers to the villagers' questions. As developers begin to poison the River on which the villagers rely, the Book predicts change. But this does not come in the form that they expect; it is the sympathetic Westerner that comes to the village who inflicts the greatest damage of all.
Read online
  • 972
The Black Dwarf

The Black Dwarf

Walter Scott

Fiction / Historical Fiction / Poetry

The story is set just after the Union of Scotland and England (1707), in the Liddesdale hills of the Scottish Borders, familiar to Scott from his work collecting ballads for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The main character is based on David Ritchie, whom Scott met in the autumn of 1797. In the tale, the dwarf is Sir Edward Mauley, a hermit regarded by the locals as being in league with the Devil, who becomes embroiled in a complex tale of love, revenge, betrayal, Jacobite schemes and a threatened forced marriage.
Read online
  • 972
Henry V

Henry V

William Shakespeare

Theatre / Classics / Poetry

A triumphantly patriotic play that also casts a critical eye at war and warriors, this great epic drama depicts a charismatic ruler in a time of national struggle. The young King Henry’s victory over the French despite overwhelming odds creates a spectacle of action, color, and thundering battles. Whether the warrior-king is urging his men “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” or wooing Katharine of France, Henry is magnificently adapted to the role he must play in England’s greatness. **Henry V** represents the culmination of Shakespeare’s art as a writer of historical drama. Each Edition Includes: • Comprehensive explanatory notes • Vivid introductions and the most up-to-date scholarship • Clear, modernized spelling and punctuation, enabling contemporary readers to understand the Elizabethan English • Completely updated, detailed bibliographies and performance histories • An interpretive essay on film adaptations of the play, along with an extensive filmography
Read online
  • 971
Tides of Peril

Tides of Peril

Rick Potter

Poetry / LGBT / Gay

Sometimes a nightmare is necessary to get to the dream. In hopes of saving his marriage, Sam takes his family on an exotic sailing adventure. Unexpected visitors sidetrack Sam's plan before they leave the marina. It's a sailing adventure across the storm ridden Gulf of Mexico, to the ultimate abduction in the Yucatan Peninsula.In a desperate measure to add excitement to Sam’s boring and crumbling marriage, he arranges an exotic sailing adventure, but it’s more than he bargained for when he and his family are abducted in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing them to endure a nightmare to escape their fate awaiting them in a foreign land.
Read online
  • 968
The Longings of Women

The Longings of Women

Marge Piercy

Poetry / Literature & Fiction / Feminism

Her marriage over, her life unraveling, writer Leila Landsman turns to work and finds herself drawn to the sensational story of Becky Burgess, a young woman accused of killing her husband with the help of her teenage lover. Becky thought she'd escaped the grim poverty of her childhood when she married up, but her husband was soon planning to trade her in for a newer model. And that's just what happened to Mary Burke, whose middle-class life ended with her divorce. Now Leila's housecleaner, Mary has a secret: she is homeless. They are three very different women who share the same longings: to be seen for who they are, to be valued and loved, but most of all, to have a physical and emotional home that can't be taken away....
Read online
  • 968
How It Is

How It Is

Samuel Beckett

Literature & Fiction / Theatre / Poetry

Published as Comment c’est in French in 1961, and in Beckett’s English in 1964, How It Is divides into three equal parts and is composed throughout in brief unpunctuated paragraphs. These tell of a narrator crawling in darkness, repeating his life as he hears it, obscurely uttered by another voice. The telling is tirelessly explicit about the feelings that pervade this world, but fragmentary and vague about all else. Together with Molloy, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is counts for many readers as his greatest novel. It is also his most innovative and challenging, both stylistically and for its extreme furthering of the vision of a self in reduced circumstances, inaugurated in his earlier sequence of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable).
Read online
  • 967
Memento Mori

Memento Mori

Muriel Spark

Fiction / Short Stories / Poetry

In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, "Remember you must die." Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.
Read online
  • 964
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

Samuel Beckett

Literature & Fiction / Theatre / Poetry

“[Beckett] is a serious writer with something serious to say about the human condition: and therefore one of the dozen or so writers those who are concerned with modern man in search of his soul should read.”—Stephen Spender, The New York Times Renowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett's criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.
Read online
  • 964
183