This is the way the world ends...for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Thirty-eight year old Cassandra is lost, alone, and grieving. Her much loved grandmother, Nell, has just died and Cassandra, her life already shaken by a tragic accident 10 years ago, feels like she has lost everything known and dear to her.

A body always tells a story - but this child’s was a blank page. Rita reached for the lantern. She trained its light on the child’s face. "Who are you?" she murmured, but the face said as little as the rest of her. It was impossible to tell whether, in life, these blunt and unfinished features had borne the imprint of prettiness, timid watchfulness, or sly mischief. If there had once been curiosity or placidity or impatience here, life had not had time to etch it into permanence. Only a very short time ago, the body and soul of this little girl had still been securely attached.

A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: To make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end.

It began with a hallucination. A time loss. A mistake. A strange man reaching out to her. All part of a tourist trap, Maggie is sure, and she's lucky it wasn't worse. Yet something about her life changed that day, and she can't put her finger on what. She forces herself to move on but can never shake the inexplicable emptiness she feels.

Surrounded by secrecy, it is home to the wildest dreams and darkest nightmares. Incredible amounts of money have been lavished on it. The best minds of two generations have labored to build it. And somehow, bit by bit, it is claiming the Earth's most valuable resource - its children.

When the world was young, and its name was Faerie, the power of magic ruled - and the Elfstones warded the race of Elves and their lands, keeping evil at bay. But when an Elven girl fell hopelessly in love with a Darkling boy of the Void, he carried away more than her heart. Thousands of years later, tumultuous times are upon the world now known as the Four Lands. Users of magic are in conflict with proponents of science. Elves have distanced their society from the other races. The Druid order is threatened.

Eve is a bold, unprecedented exploration of the creation narrative, true to the original texts and centuries of scholarship - yet with breathtaking discoveries that challenge traditional misconceptions about who we are and how we're made. As The Shack awakened listeners to a personal, nonreligious understanding of God, Eve will free us from faulty interpretations that have compromised human relationships since the Garden of Eden.

Christy Loren has come to fear her gift of clairvoyance, an unwanted legacy from her mother, a famous psychic. Without warning, visions envelop her - visions that have guided the police, too late, to the bodies of murder victims. To escape these horrors, Christy flees her home in Long Island to seek peace and safety in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and the reassuring presence of her down-to-earth aunt.

From London to Corsica to Paris — as a young woman pursues the truth about her late mother, two captivating love stories unfurl in this captivating novel from the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Paris Apartment and The Guest List.

Beneath the roiling surface of Betelgeuse, scientists anxiously await the one man essential to the success of Starmuse, the greatest engineering project in human history. But on Kantano’s World, Willard Ruskin battles invisible agents for control of his life, his physical form, and even his memories. Drawn into a conflict from which not even death will free him, Ruskin must find a way to reach Betelgeuse before his enemies sabotage Starmuse—and humanity’s future among the stars. A harrowing journey from inside the human cell... to the mind of a dying star.

This is the second book in the Peaceful Warrior Saga. Neither a sequel nor prequel, this adventure takes place within the context of the original book, shedding new light on the path he was to travel, and would one day teach. After a period of training with the man he calls Socrates, Dan Millman is sent away by his old mentor to apply what he has learned to everyday life.

Once there was a young woman from a well-to-do New England family who never quite fit with the drawing rooms and parlors of her kin. Called instead to the tangled woods and wild cliffs surrounding her family’s estate, Margaret Harlowe grew both stranger and more beautiful as she cultivated her uncanny power. Soon, whispers of “witch” dogged her footsteps, and Margaret’s power began to wind itself with the tendrils of something darker.

Single mom Cedar McLeod leads an ordinary but lonely life, balancing the demands of her career and her six-year-old daughter, Eden. One day, a fight between the two leads to the stunning discovery that Eden can open portals to anywhere she imagines. But before they can learn more about Eden’s extraordinary gift, the young girl mysteriously disappears. Desperate to find answers and her daughter, Cedar seeks out Eden’s father, who left before Eden was born.

Tan Twan Eng's debut novel casts a powerful spell and has garnered comparisons to celebrated wartime storytellers Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Set during the tumult of World War II, on the lush Malayan island of Penang, The Gift of Rain tells a riveting and poignant tale about a young man caught in the tangle of wartime loyalties and deceits. In 1939, 16-year-old Philip Hutton - the half-Chinese, half-English youngest child of the head of one of Penang's great trading families - feels alienated from both the Chinese and British communities.

A bonus never-before-released short story by best-selling author Isobelle Carmody. Before the apocolyptic Great White - and the regressive theology that ruled the decimated population in its wake - the city of Uropa is a gleaming metropolis devoted wholly to materialistic consumption.

A tale of the distant future by the author of The Shape-Changer's Wife brings listeners to a world in which the fate of all life rests on the voice of an angel.

When Rose first met Charles, he was trapped in the form of a white bear. To rescue him, Rose traveled to the land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon to defeat the evil Troll Queen. Now, Rose has found her happily ever after with Charles - until a sudden storm destroys his ship and he is presumed dead. But Rose doesn’t believe the shipwreck was an act of nature, nor does she believe Charles is truly dead. Something much more sinister is at work.

Sera Lighthaven has always felt as if she didn’t quite belong among her people, the Cerulean, who live in the city above the sky. She is curious about everything - especially the planet her city is magically tethered to - and can’t stop questioning things. Sera has always longed for the day when the tether will finally break and the Cerulean can move to a new planet. But when Sera is chosen as the sacrifice to break the tether, she feels betrayed by everything in which she’d been taught to trust. In order to save her city, Sera must end her own life.

16-year-old Mara Westray has just lost her mother, and now, being shipped off to live with the father she doesn’t know is not how she imagined grieving. She's already counting down the days until she turns 18 and can leave the tiny island of Swans Landing. But from the moment she steps off the ferry, nothing is as ordinary as it looks. As she tries to unravel the events that led to her mom fleeing the island 16 years ago, Mara finds that the biggest secret of all is only the beginning.

In a world where an industrial revolution is powered by magic, Tyen, a student of archaeology, unearths a sentient book called Vella. Once a young sorcerer-bookbinder, Vella was transformed into a useful tool by one of the greatest sorcerers of history. Since then she has been collecting information, including a vital clue to the disaster Tyen’s world faces.Elsewhere, in an land ruled by priests, Rielle the dyer’s daughter has been taught that to use magic is to steal from the Angels.

Rhoma Grace is a 16-year-old student from House Cancer with an unusual way of reading the stars. While her classmates use measurements to make accurate astrological predictions, she looks up at the night sky and makes up stories.

Rhapsody is a woman, a singer of some talent who is swept up into events of world-shattering import. On the run from an old romantic interest who won't take no for an answer, Rhapsody literally bumps into a couple of shady characters: half breeds who come to her rescue in the nick of time. Only the rescue turns into an abduction, and Rhapsody soon finds herself dragged along on an epic voyage--one that spans centuries and ranges across a wonder-filled fantasy world.

Udo's biggest problem isn't being a digger (that's low class), or staying drunk (that's damn expensive), or avoiding the Dwergaz (they're monsters), or even pissing off the supposed Gods. It's that his reality...well, it isn't what he thought. And now, he can't even afford to drink because his so-called friend Nicz is cutting into his business, digging up tin, iron, and copper. So Udo forms a new plan: clay. After all, clay jars are used to store everything: meat, herbs, and, his personal favorite, ale.

Moth was a beautiful planet, the only one with wings - two great golden clouds suspended in space around it. Here was a wide-open world for any venture a man might scheme. The planet attracted unwary travelers, hardened space-sailors, and merchant buccaneers - a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying snake Pip.

Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but the arrival of the 300-kilometer long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge.

On a snowy night, Cara and her grandmother are pursued into St. Christopher's church by an unknown man. Clutching her grandmother's mysterious amulet, and following the old woman's instructions, Cara escapes their pursuer and falls into Luster, the world of the unicorns.

No one knows where the Tufa came from or how they ended up in the mountains of east Tennessee. When the first Europeans came to the Smoky Mountains, the Tufa were already there. Dark-haired and enigmatic, they live quietly in the hills and valleys of Cloud County, their origins lost to history. But there are clues in their music, hidden in the songs they have passed down for generations.

A posthumous recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Marion Zimmer Bradley reinvented - and rejuvenated - the King Arthur mythos with her extraordinary Mists of Avalon series. In this epic work, Bradley follows the arc of the timeless tale from the perspective of its previously marginalized female characters: Celtic priestess Morgaine, Gwenhwyfar, and High Priestess Viviane.

Berlin in autumn: Christine Starlight lives in an artists' colony with her lover Jude, whose patience and beauty have eased her battle with chronic pain. But Christine begins to be haunted by childhood recollections of a little girl's disappearance and the flapping of a blackbird's wings. Then her world is rocked by the return of a childhood friend... Mayfridh rules over a land where a wolf is the queen's counsellor, fate turns on the fall of an autumn leaf and mortals feel no pain.