SUMMARY: Crushing gravity. Thin air. Winters of unimaginable cold Searing summers under two suns. A deadly wasteland teeming with monsters and killing fever. That was Ragnarok, the most dreaded planet yet discovered. And Ragnarok was where a thousand untrained Earthmen -- and women and children -- were brutally marooned by a sadistic enemy. Two hundred died the first night. In the morning, the survivors knew what they must live for...revenge!

Tom Godwin's story "The Cold Equations" rocked the science fiction world when it appeared. A pilot is on an emergency mission to a planet whose colony is doomed if he doesn't get there. He has just enough fuel to reach the planet -- then he finds he has a stowaway, a young girl wanting to be with her brother on the colony If the pilot jettisons her through the airlock, the ship will barely make it to a landing on the planet. If he does not, the ship will crash and both of them as well as the colony will die. What will he do? Also in this volume are other unforgettable stories by Godwin, including his full-length novel The Survivors, which poses another problem in survival: if hostile aliens have marooned you and hundreds of other people on a nearly uninhabitable planet, how do you manage not only to endure, but to get revenge? A large volume by a master of science fiction adventure with an extra dimension of speculation.

From Publishers Weekly

Bestselling author Godwin (Evensong; The Finishing School) brings readers back in time to the early 1950s in this endearing story of Catholic school girls and the nuns who oversee them. As Mother Suzanne Ravenel begins a memoir of her 60-plus years at Mount St. Gabriel's School in Mountain City, N.C., she's forced to re-examine the toxic year of 1951–1952, one of her worst at the school—beginning with the arrival of ninth-grade student Chloe Starnes, who's recently lost her mother, and Mother Malloy, a beautiful young nun assigned to the freshman class. Starnes and Malloy's arrivals presage a shift in the ranks of freshman Tildy Stratton's cruel clique, with significant consequences for all involved. Change, when it finally comes, stems from the girls' attempt to revive a play written years before by Ravenel. Godwin captures brilliantly the subtleties of friendships between teenage girls, their ambivalence toward religion and their momentous struggle to define people—especially themselves. Poignant and transporting, this faux memoir makes a convincing, satisfying novel. (Dec.)
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Review

"A large, roomy story of love, loss, fidelity, secrets, rivalry and faith in the lives of a charming, flawed troupe of characters…. Provocative and rewarding."—Boston Globe

"This rich world…draws and holds the reader from the first to the final pages of the work. " —Denver Post

"Tender but clear-eyed …Godwin’s South has always been a place where charm and good manners can barely conceal the emotional drama pulsing beneath the surface…Recalls the fraught family bonds of Godwin’s best novels…"—San Francisco Chronicle

"Godwin’s reserved yet powerful new novel is set in a boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina…Though it’s a beautiful well-intentioned institution, the school is anything but serene…."—New York Times Book Review

"If you plan on reading just one great novel in 2010, this might be it… a big old-fashioned book about jealousy and passion at a Catholic girl’s school, written with Gail Godwin’s trademark depth and humor…."—Bookpage

"Godwin’s writing is … marvelous, engaging, clever." —Christian Science Monitor

"Poignant and transporting…convincing, satisfying."—Publishers Weekly

"Intoxicating… Godwin’s latest novel charms."—Asheville Citizen-Times

"Masterly."—Dallas Morning News

“A strong story populated by a host of memorable characters–smart, satisfying fiction, one of the author’s best in years.”—Kirkus Reviews starred review,

"If you plan on reading just one great novel in 2010, this might be it. Unfinished Desires is a big old-fashioned book about jealousy and passion at a Catholic girl’s school, written with best-selling author Gail Godwin’s trademark depth and humor &hell...

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen’s decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of and also harks back to Godwin’s memorable novel of growing up, With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can’t undo. It will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

His name was Joshua Carter. Now it's whatever she wants it to be.

She is a Deliverer.

She lures young men and delivers them to be sold. She delivers the strikes that enforce their obedience. She delivers the sexual training that determines their purchase price.

As long as she delivers, the arrangement that protects her family will hold.

Delivering is all she knows.

The one thing she can't deliver is a captive from slavery.

Until him.

And her stubborn slave thinks he can deliver her...from herself.

The Thing in the City had an immense mass of knowledge, and the immense power that stems from vast knowledge. But—it lacked something which, because it was lacking, it could not know it lacked, until it engulfed the girl…

AFTER TWO CENTURIES….

The sound came swiftly nearer, rising in pitch and swelling in volume. Then it broke through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly—the Gern battle cruiser, come to seek them out and destroy them.

Humbolt dropped inside the stockade, exulting. For two hundred years his people had been waiting for the chance to fight the mighty Gern Empire…

… with bows and arrows against blasters and bombs!

Después de dos siglos. El ruido iba haciéndose cada vez más intenso, acercándose más y más, aumentando de grado y dilatándose en volúmen. Luego, el artefacto que lo producía atravesó las nubes, enorme y negro. Maravillosamente destructiva, la nave de los Gern acababa de descubrirles y se acercaba para terminar con ellos. Humbolt entró en el pilotaje contento y feliz. Durante doscientos años su pueblo había estado esperando la oportunidad de combatir con el poderoso Imperio Gern. ¡Condenados a muerte! Por una aplastante gravedad, aire enrarecido y unos inviernos de un frío jamás imaginado. Veranos agotadores bajo dos soles. Esto era Ragnarok, el planeta más horripilante hasta entonces descubierto. Y Ragnarok era donde un millar de inexpertos terrestres, junto con mujeres y niños, habían sido abandonados por un sádico enemigo.