A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power...

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Fortunes Stroke

Link, the supercomputer from a future that should not exist, has used terror and gunpowder weapons to forge the Malwa Empire: harnessing the vast manpower of the Indian subcontinent and using the barbarian races of the periphery to bind the whole together. No power on Earth in the 6th century could stand against Link's evil.

Aide, a human soul embodied in a jewel, has come back to halt evil's progress. Aide has no power but that of truth, but truth is the only power that could move the greatest general of the age, Belisarius.

With his sword, his paladins, and his genius, Belisarius has turned the armies of Byzantium into a weapon capable of blunting the first assault of the Malwa hordes. Now, supported by allies from all the world yet free, Belisarius, with his wife and co-commander Antonia, faces overwhelming Malwa numbers in a ring that tightens about them.

There is no room for maneuver and no safety in defeat. The armies of Good and Evil gathered on the fertile plains of Mesopotamia will decide the fate of the world.

And the fate of all the future!

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Fire in the Mist

The attack was not wolf madness, but wolf boldness. They had come, had taken what they wanted without challenge, and they had grown confident. Now they wanted her sheep.

Now they wanted her.

The pack leader, silver-tipped-black and immense, faced Faia and strode stiff-legged forward; head down, ears flat back, pale, cold eyes gleaming. His lips drew back from yellowed teeth. He rumbled a warning growl as he advanced.

She clutched her staff, and her belly tightened with fear. There was no time to reach for the slingshot and the studded wolfshot. She made a quick thrust at the beast with her walking stick that caught him in the teeth. He danced back, and crouched for a leap, his eyes fixed on her throat.

Lady, help me!

Faia drew the earth's energy, thinking it into her staff, thinking, Give the staff strength!

And somehow, she was outside of herself, and staring down at the massive black wolf and the tall, rangy girl who faced him off with nothing but a brass-tipped walking stick.

At the same instant, she was inside herself, and the strength was there—earth-strength, Lady-strength, confidence. Faia, stilled inside, deadly calm, swung the staff up as the wolf lunged and caught him across the chest; the impact of his great weight flung her backward a staggered step. But light flowed from the staff around the wolf, blazing green fire. The wolf screamed, its voice for a moment disconcertingly human. Then he crumpled to the ground and was still—unmarked, stone dead.

At the scream, the other wolves vanished into the forest, disappearing like the memories of shadows.

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Field of Dishonor

HONOR BETRAYED

The People's Republic of Haven's sneak attack on the Kingdom of Manticore has failed. The Peeps are in disarray, their leaders fighting for power in bloody revolution, and the Royal Manticoran Navy stands victorious.

But Manticore has domestic problems of its own, and success can be more treacherous than defeat for Honor Harrington. Now, trapped at the core of a political crisis she never sought, betrayed by an old and vicious enemy she'd thought vanquished forever, she stands alone.

She must fight for justice on a battlefield she never trained for in a private war that offers just two choices: death . . . or a "victory" that can end only in dishonor and the loss of all she loves.

***

David Weber is the new Big Name in science fiction, and his dauntless Honor Harrington has conquered not only the enemy but the hearts of thousands of readers everywhere, who have been relentlessly demanding Honor's exploits in a more permanent form. And we're happy to oblige.

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A collection of novellas and stories from one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the fantasy genre, Robin Hobb. Including work written under her pseudonym, Megan Lindholm.Bingtown heiresses rub shoulders in this wonderful collection with vampires and alien musicians, tramps and feral cats.In The Homecoming, Lady Carillion Carrock and a number of other Jamaillian nobles are sailing to the Cursed Shores. Their journey is not by choice: for plotting against the Satrap, their wealth has been confiscated and they have been exiled. Until now, Carillion has done nothing but lead a life of privilege. She believes they are bound for wondrous cities, cities where ancient kings and queens dusted their skin with gold and wore jewels above their eyes. But when she is marooned by the ship’s unscrupulous captain, she will soon discover the grim reality of what survival in the Rain Wilds entails.The Silver Lady is a would-be writer, ekeing out a dull existence by working in a Sears store. The one day a man comes in: fortyish, pleasant-looking. Nothing out of the ordinary. Except he says his name is Merlin, and he’s about to change her life.Rosemary got involved with the wrong man. Pell is lazy, good for nothing, a bully. Her best friend Hilia knew it and so did her tom cat, Marmalade. But love is blind: Rosemary had Pell’s baby, renovated the cottage his grandfather left in his will, turned its land to good use; and then he left her for another woman. Now he’s back, and something must be done…

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Lolita

Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido.

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The Naked Face

Sidney Sheldon’s thrilling first novel, repackaged to accompany his fascinating memoirs, ‘The Other Side of Me.’ The psychiatrist's couch holds many secrets. Can it also hold the key to a series of brutal murders? John Hanson, murdered in the street in a gruesome but apparently arbitrary attack. Carol Roberts, brutally tortured and left to die in agony. Now it's the turn of psychoanalyst Dr Judd Stevens… In a chilling game of cat and mouse, Judd must become the hunter rather than the hunted if he wants to stay alive. Working with the mindset of a detective, he must analyse his patients, searching for a motive, clues, reasons. Could it be Teri Washburn, Hollywood starlet, thrown out of tinsel town in scandal and now addicted to sex? Could it be Harrison Burke, top business man and disturbed paranoiac? Or could it be Alexander Fallon, a crazed evangelist, convinced that God has chosen him to avenge all sin in the world? In this deadly game, there can only be one winner…If Judd is to survive he must play the game to win. This is Sidney Sheldon's first novel – a gripping, intense thriller that brought him fame as a bestselling novelist.


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