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Mentre l’esercito delle Terre ancora libere dal potere del Tiranno crolla sotto l’avanzata delle truppe nemiche e degli agghiaccianti schieramenti dei fantasmi, Nihal, l’ultimo mezzelfo del Mondo Emerso, è in viaggio con il giovane mago Sennar per una missione disperata: recuperare le otto pietre di un talismano dai poteri infiniti, capace di porre fine alla guerra. Ciascuna delle otto Terre del Mondo Emerso nasconde all’interno di un santuario una delle pietre dedicate agli Spiriti della natura: Acqua, Luce, Mare, Tempo, Fuoco, Terra, Oscurità, Aria. Se Nihal riuscirà a raggiungere tutti i santuari e a riunire le pietre del talismano, potrà chiamare a raccolta gli Spiriti e annullare ogni forma di magia, comprese le terribili armi del Tiranno. Nella Terra dell’Acqua, intanto, il maestro di Nihal, lo gnomo Ido, scopre di avere un nuovo e terribile nemico che rischia di trascinarlo verso un passato da cui sembra impossibile riscattarsi.<

The heroes are eager to sail to Troy for war, but the wind is still. To fill their sails and set out, they must sacrifice Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia-and how does a human girl become the wind? The starkness and psychological insight of Rachel Swirsky's Tor.com story earned it a place among the finalists for the 2010 Nebula Award. Rachel Swirsky's short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, and Subterranean Magazine, among others, and has been collected in Year's Best anthologies edited by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, and the VanderMeers. She is also the submissions editor of Podcastle, an audio fantasy magazine.<

Nihal è davvero strana, nel Mondo Emerso sembra non esserci nessuno come lei: grandi occhi viola, orecchie appuntite, capelli blu. È stata cresciuta da un armaiolo e vive in una delle tante città-torri della Terra del Vento, giocando a combattere insieme a un gruppo di amici che l’ha eletta capo per la sua forza e agilità. Ma tutto cambia all’improvviso quando la Terra del Vento viene attaccata dal Tiranno, il despota che già ha conquistato cinque delle otto Terre che compongono il Mondo Emerso. A nulla vale la resistenza dell’esercito dei popoli liberi, né i maghi che cercano di proteggere le città con incantesimi. A Nihal rimane solo una scelta: diventare un vero guerriero e difendere gli innocenti che rischiano di cadere sotto il potere del Tiranno.<

In the twenty-first century, a battered world is ruled by a crafty old tyrant, Genghis II Mao IV Khan. The Khan is ninety-three years old, his life systems sustained by the skill of Mordecai Shadrach, a brilliant young surgeon whose chief function is to replace the Khan’s worn-out organs. Within the vast tower-complex, the most advanced equipment is dedicated to three top-priority projects, each designed to keep the Khan immortal. Most sinister of these is Project Avatar, by which the Khan’s mind and persona are to be transferred to a younger body.

Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1976.

Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1977.

Proseguono le avventure della giovane guerriera Nihal, l’ultimo mezzoelfo esistente nel Mondo Emerso, e dell’inseparabile amico mago Sennar. Insieme combattono contro le forze del Tiranno deciso a conquistare le Terre libere e ad assoggettarne tutti gli abitanti per mezzo della stregoneria. Adesso Nihal è alle prese con il mistero della Lacrima, una pietra che sembra dotata di enormi poteri, mentre Sennar è partito alla ricerca delle Terre Sommerse, un continente di cui i secoli hanno cancellato le tracce. Per ritrovarlo, Sennar è costretto a imbarcarsi su una nave pirata e combattere contro i mostri del mare.<

‘Honestly and intelligently written… offers lessons to those who choose to heed it on the folly of trying to make simple diagnoses or to apply simple remedies in Afghanistan’ Isabel Hilton, Daily Telegraph

‘A colourful portrait of people struggling to survive in the most brutal circumstances… bears witness to the power of literature to withstand even the most repressive regime’ Michael Arditti, Daily Mail

‘A compelling picture of a country which tragically continues to tear itself apart’ Sunday Telegraph

‘A triumph. From the terrors and complexities of courtship through the perilous cross-country pilgrimage by a guilt-addled son to the agonising fate of a thieving carpenter, these are compelling little dramas, mined from the resource of “every day life”… and peopled by characters who bristle with life and emotion and individuality…while their stories delight with the freshness of something foreign, they are both universal and intimately personal… [the] work’s outward simplicity is matched by a subtle and complex understanding: the quality of truth’ Scotsman

‘Magnificent… Beautifully written, it dares to bestride incompatible worlds. It is the best outsider tale I have read from within the bounds of Islamic life since Sarah Hobson’s Through Persia in Disguise, published twenty-nine years ago’ Scotland on Sunday

‘A unique insight into another world’ Daily Mirror

‘Moving and utterly gripping’ Big Issue in the North

‘A closely observed, affecting account… an admirable, revealing portrait of daily life in a country that Washington claims to have liberated but does not begin to understand’ Washington Post

‘Astounding… an international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban’ Publishers Weekly

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"In The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad tries to answer the question: What kind of lives do Afghani men, women and children lead after the fall of the Taliban? She does this through a case study of one family. Economically, the Khans are not a typical Afghani family. The head, Sultan, owns bookstores in the country's capitol, and he is modestly wealthy. When the author, Asne Seierstad, first meets him, she is impressed by his seemingly liberal way of thinking, especially with respect to women. Seierstad thinks she might have struck a cultural anomaly in the male-dominated Afghan society and arranges to live with Sultan and his family to develop her story on life in Afghanistan.

During her four month stay with the Khans, Seierstad interviewed dozens of family members, went on a religious pilgrimage, and attended weddings. Through her interviews and experiences, she found that her first impression of Sultan was somewhat incorrect. While Sultan generally supposed women's rights, capitolism and other social liberties in his conversations with outsiders, he still keeps a firm, patriarchial grip on his family. Despite being wealthier that most Afghanis, Sultan refuses to send his sons to school, and instead forces them to work at his bookstore. He marries a second wife and exiled his

first wife to Pakistan where she had to live alone and keep his second house. Sultan's ruling arm also extended over his youngest sister, Lelia, whom he keeps in his home as a servant.

Each chapter of The Bookseller of Kabul focuses on a different member of the Khan family or a different event in the family's collective life. Through these individual stories, Seierstad creates her collage of what it is like to be a man, woman or child in Kabul, Afghanistan."

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist — who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter — it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and American Indian legends, a nightmarish Eastern European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.<

Sex oozes from every page of this erotic futuristic thriller. In a far-future class-driven android society, most of the populace are slave-chipped and owned by wealthy aristos. When low-caste but unenslaved android Freya offends an aristo and needs to get off-world, she takes a courier position with the mysterious Jeeves Corporation, but the job turns out to have dangers of its own. Designed as a pleasure-module, Freya isn’t quite as obsolete as she could be, as androids have sex with each other incessantly. Hugo-winner Charles Stross has a deep message of how android slavery recapitulates humanity’s past mistakes, but he struggles to make it heard over the moans and gunshots. Readers nostalgic for the SF of the ’60s will find much that’s familiar (including Freya’s jumpsuit-clad form on the cover), but that doesn’t quite compensate for the flaws.<

A young man grows up in a town with a sinister history. The concentration camp may have been liberated years ago, but its walls still cast their long shadows and some of the inhabitants are quite determined to not to allow anyone to forget. When the camp is marked for demolition, one of the survivors begins a campaign to preserve it, quickly attracting donations from wealthy benefactors, a cult-like following of young travellers, and a steady stream of tourists buying souvenir t-shirts.But before long, the authorities impose a brutal crack-down, leaving only an 'official' memorial and three young collaborators whose commitment to the act of remembering will drive them ever closer to the evils they hoped to escape.

Bold, brilliant and blackly comic, paints a deeply troubling portrait of a country dealing with its ghosts and asks: at what point do we consign the past to history?

Cunoscut şi apreciat mai ales datorită fascinantei ecranizări a regizorului Andrei Tarkovski — Călăuza —, acest roman le-a adus fraţilor Strugaţki celebritatea mondială. Cartea, apărută cu mari dificultăţi în fosta Uniune Sovietică, este o alegorie politică cu conotaţii filosofice şi etice, scrisă în cheie science-fiction, care depăşeşte cu mult modelul scrierilor de anticipaţie sau al distopiilor sociografice. Prin consistenţa sa narativă şi inteligenţa notării detaliilor semnificative, prin atmosfera sa metafizico-fantastică şi stilul bogat şi fluent, cartea fraţilor Strugaţki e o operă epică în adevăratul sens al cuvântului.<

Continuing Tavares’s award-winning “Kingdom” series (begun in , winner of the Saramago Prize), recounts a life of bizarre routines and patterns. Routine humiliation at a factory; routine maintenance of the world’s most esoteric collection; and the most important routine of all: the operation of a mysterious machine on a factory floor. Yet all of Joseph Walser’s routines are violently disrupted when his city is occupied by an invading army, leaving him faced with political intrigues, marital discord, and finally, one last, catastrophic confrontation with his beloved machine.<

Inside Alaska 's biggest national park, surrounding the town of Niniltna, a gold mining company has started buying up land. The residents of the Park, are uneasy. 'But gold is up to nine hundred dollars an ounce,' is the refrain of Talia Macleod, the popular Alaskan skiing champ the company hired to improve their relations with Alaskans. And she promises much needed jobs to the locals. But before she can make her way to every village in the area to make her case at town meetings and village breakfasts, there are two murders – one a long-standing mine opponent, and Ms. Macleod herself. Between that and a series of attacks on snow mobilers up the Kanuyaq River, not to mention the still-open homicide of Park villain Louis Deem last year, part-time P.I. and newly elected chairman of the Niniltna Native Association Kate Shugak has her hands very much full.<

"A little thing happened to me. Which could have just as easily happened to you. You re on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and you re about to go see some friends, but something holds you back, a mysterious reticence that prevents you from going to find them. Here is the novel of this reticence, small and specific, and of the fears that it instigates, little by little. Because not only are your friends not there when you do decide to go find them, but, several days later, you find a dead cat in the harbor, a black cat floating in front of you on the water. ."

In Jean-Philippe Toussaint 's take on the detective novel, we find a man on vacation in a tiny village, where a writer named Biaggi appears to be keeping him under surveillance. To what end? Ah, but it 's far more pleasant to enjoy the Mediterranean night air than to look for answers, make deductions, or get upset isn't it?

Everyone knew Len Dreyer, a handyman for hire in the Park near Niniltna, Alaska, but no one knew anything else about him. Even Kate Shugak hired him to thin the trees on her 160-acre homestead and was planning to ask him to help build a small second cabin on her property for Johnny Morgan, a teenaged boy in her care. But she, the Park's unofficial p.i., seems to have known less about him than anyone.

Alaska is a place where anybody can bury his history and start fresh, and for any reason, but this particular mystery comes to light when Len Dreyer turns up murdered. His body is discovered, frozen solid, in the path of a receding glacier with the hole from a shotgun blast in his chest. No one even knew he was missing, but it turns out he's been missing for months.

Alaska State Trooper Jim Chopin asks Kate to help him dig into Dreyer's background, in the hope of finding some reason for his murder. She takes the case, mindful of the need for gainful employment as she copes with her responsibility for Johnny, a constant reminder of his father, her dead lover. Little does she imagine that by trying to provide for him she just might put him right in the path of danger.

A talented writer at the prime of her abilities, Stabenow delivers a masterful crime novel that turns out to be as much about living as it is about dying.

In , our narrator — a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself — travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan’s historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, casts the entire globe in a cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own eyes with us…<

Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint’s acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie — the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint’s novels, ’s plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.<

In Thailand, two men hire some modern-day pirates to hijack a Russian freighter. It is appallingly easy and the ship sails, undetected, toward the western coast of North America.On the Bering Sea, the USS Sojourner Truth, a Coast Guard cutter, patrols the Maritime Boundary Line. The seasoned crew, dealing with a high volume of ocean-going traffic, is finding that choppy seas are making their efforts even more difficult.In Washington DC, a CIA analyst traces the sale of black market plutonium. As the pieces fit together, he realizes that a terrorist attack is under way on a valuable-and vulnerable-American target. He also sees that the Sojourner Truth is sailing right into the attack-putting his estranged wife, the second in command on the Sojourner, at the heart of an international crisis.Relentlessly gripping and frighteningly plausible, The Blindfold Game is the pinnacle of Dana Stabenow+s award-winning career.<

"Kate Shugak is the answer if you are looking for something unique in the crowded field of crime fiction." – Michael Connelly

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Thirty-one years ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Victoria Pilz Bannister Muravieff was convicted of murdering her seventeen-year-old son William. The jury returned a quick verdict of guilty, believing the prosecutor's claims that she had set fire to her own home with both her sons inside; William died and the other, Oliver, narrowly escaped. Victoria was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and though she pled not guilty at the trial, she never again denied her guilt.

Now her daughter, Charlotte Muravieff, has hired Kate Shugak to clear her mother's name. Her daughter has always believed in her innocence, and now that Victoria has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Charlotte wants her free. Kate is the only p.i. Charlotte can find who's willing to take such a long-shot case. Kate, on the other hand, is only willing because she's suddenly a single parent to a teenager, a teenager she hopes will decide to go to college. Besides, it can't be bad to do a favor for the Bannister family, one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Alaska's short history.

As Kate begins an investigation, Victoria protests, refusing to cooperate. But soon it seems she isn't the only one who wants to leave the past in the past. In this spell-binding novel, Kate's confrontation with thirty years of secrets and regret-and murder-in one of Alaska's most powerful families shows award-winning crime writer Dana Stabenow at the top of her game.