Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. A journey that is as beautifully rendered as it is heart wrenching, the novel is “[t]he literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours” (NPR). Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the listener’s guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.

Timeless Tales for Kids is an enchanting compilation of children's classic stories read by an all-star cast. Olivia Colman reads E. Nesbit's classic novel The Railway Children, a masterpiece in children's fiction wonderfully evoking a bygone age, packed with fun, excitement and adventure. Bill Nighy reads a much-loved children's classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which continues to delight young and old with its enchanting tale of witches, flying monkeys and magical shoes.

An enchanting, exciting fantasy about a real-world girl searching for her sister in a land full of magic and strange creatures, blending the timeless feel of A Wrinkle in Time with Frozen’s powerful themes of identity, enchantment, and sisterhood. Claire Martinson still worries about her older sister Sophie, who battled a mysterious illness last year. But things are back to normal as they move into Windermere Manor...until the sisters climb a strange ladder in a fireplace and enter the magical land of Arden.

In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. That’s why they’re banished for their 16th year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive. Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life - a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear.

It is 1913, and 12-year-old Petra Luna’s mamá has died while the revolution rages in Mexico. Before her papá is dragged away by soldiers, Petra vows to him that she will care for the family she has left — her abuelita, her little sister, Amelia, and her baby brother, Luisito — until they can be reunited.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

Darwin, 1942. As Japanese bombs rain down on her hometown, newly orphaned Molly Hook looks to the skies and runs for her life. Inside a duffel bag, she carries a stone heart and a map that will lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer whom she believes cursed her family. Accompanying her are the most unlikely traveling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a Japanese fighter pilot who’s abandoned his post. Messages from the skies above guide them towards treasure, but foes are close on their trail.

A sensual, powerful, and thought-provoking Tarzan retelling. Eden Matthews stumbled upon the discovery of a lifetime while photographing wildlife deep in the heart of Africa.... A gorgeous god of a man living in the wilds of the African jungle among a family of gorillas.... When he saves her life, she’s compelled to uncover the man’s tragic past and the fate that led him to grow up in the wild. But Eden soon learns she can take man from the wild, but she can’t take the wild out of the man.... When her savage savior soon shows her just what he wants of her....

Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries.

Cadie Kessler has spent decades trying to cover up one truth. One moment. But deep down, didn’t she always know her secret would surface? An urgent message from her long-estranged best friend Daniela Garcia brings Cadie, now a forestry researcher, back to her childhood home. There, Cadie and Daniela are forced to face a dark secret that ended both their idyllic childhood bond and the magical summer that takes up more space in Cadie’s memory then all her other years combined.

Targa fears the truth will lose her the man she loves. As she returns to Poland to reunite with Antoni, she wishes she could share her mermaid secrets without betraying her kind. But when a magical stone goes missing from the local museum, the siren may have to choose between protecting her loved ones and treason.

Isha is a girl who loves animals but struggles in the confines of school. When she is sent away to live with her grandparents on the Indian countryside, she discovers a sacred grove where a young Bengal tiger has taken refuge. Isha knows that the ever-shrinking forests of India mean there are few places left for a tiger to hide. When the local villagers also discover the tiger, Isha finds herself embroiled in a life-or-death cultural controversy.

Fans of cosmic horror will have much to sup on in these eight tales. The supernatural intrudes upon a wedding; a pier becomes the site of tragedy; a collapsed building is only the start of the nightmare for those trapped in the ruins; a scientist makes the discovery of a lifetime, only to find out that what he’s unearthed has dire consequences not only for himself, but for all of mankind.

When a star dies, a new one must be born. The Sun God chooses the village of Endwever to provide a mortal womb. The birthing of a star is always fatal for the mother, and Ceris Wenden, who considers herself an outsider, sacrifices herself to secure her family’s honor and take control of her legacy. But after her star child is born, Ceris does what no other star mother has: she survives. When Ceris returns to Endwever, however, it’s not nine months later—it’s seven hundred years later.

On a trip to reignite the spark in her marriage, Alaina Grace’s upgraded first-class ticket places her far from her husband and next to the notorious Jack Volmer, a former teen actor who’d previously hung on posters in her childhood bedroom. When an unusual storm forces their plane out of the sky, her ticket will save her life and force her to question everything.

The kids at school call Billy "Dragon Breath" for good reason. His breath is bad! It isn't the normal, morning-mouth bad; it's the hot-as-fire, "don't-you-dare-get-near-me" bad. And hearing "Dragon Breath" ringing in his ears, he constantly tries to cool his oral volcano. Trouble erupts when his hot breath sets off the fire sprinklers in the boys' restroom at school, and his parents learn that they've kept their secret for too long. Billy finally discovers the secret. His father was once a dragon!

In the dawn of history, a valiant people forged a pathway from an old world into a new one. Led by a dreamer who followed the spirit of the wolf, a handful of courageous men and women dared to cross the frozen wastes to find an untouched, unspoiled continent.

Psychologist Loche Newirth becomes hunted when he sees a painting that opens a window onto the afterlife. An ancient order of men seeking to control the art pursue him across the world, through centuries, into madness, and beyond. The first part of Michael B. Koep's the Newirth Mythology The Invasion of Heaven is mystery, adventure, myth, betrayal, murder, and madness. Loche Newirth wonders if it was his fall: The 50-foot drop from the rocky cliff to the icy water below. Is this why he has been hallucinating?

In a magnificent, war-torn world cut by soaring red canyons, an evil ruler launches a search for a mystical artifact that he hopes will bring him ultimate power - an ancient witch’s pot that reputedly contains the trapped soul of the most powerful witch ever to have lived. The aged healer Tocho has to stop him, but to do it he must ally himself with the bitter and broken witch hunter, Maicoh, whose only goal is achieving one last great kill.

Evoking Beyoncé’s Lemonade for a teen audience, these authors who are truly Octavia Butler’s heirs have woven worlds to create a stunning narrative that puts Black women and gender-nonconforming individuals at its center. A Phoenix First Must Burn will take you on a journey from folktales retold to futuristic societies and everything in between. Filled with stories of love and betrayal, strength and resistance, this collection contains an array of complex and true-to-life characters through which you cannot help but see yourself reflected.

Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.

In a post-apocalyptic world ruled by a Governor who is both feared and worshipped, Willow is a 17-year-old girl who is trying to get through her last year of studies. But when her father dies, she experiences strange dreams that change everything about how she looks at the world and at herself. Haunted by the tragedy, Willow pushes herself beyond anything she could have imagined she was capable of. It's only when she catches the attention of some of the Governor's informants that her world is turned upside-down.

Raised by a vampire in a secret society of witches, shifters, and elves, Charlotte finds that she is the freak in her world of magic and wonder. When she stands before an army of impossible obstacles, the likelihood of survival in this coming-of-age modern fairy tale is slim, resulting in a war between light and darkness. Charlotte knows no other home than the one nestled deep in the woods of Eastern Europe, where witches draw spells of enchantment, shifters throw tea parties, and elves are the closest in kin.

Botswana, 1976: Isaac Muthethe thinks he is dead. Smuggled across the border from South Africa in a hearse, he awakens covered in dust, staring at blue sky and the face of White Dog. Far from dead, he is, for the first time, in a country without apartheid. A medical student in South Africa, he was forced to flee after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force.

Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In “Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a 2,000-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In “The Prospectors”, two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. Plus much more.

It is 1913, and 12-year-old Petra Luna’s mamá has died while the revolution rages in Mexico. Before her papá is dragged away by soldiers, Petra vows to him that she will care for the family she has left — her abuelita, her little sister, Amelia, and her baby brother, Luisito — until they can be reunited.

An unremembered past. A deadly power. A destiny she never saw coming.... Nic Rutherford is tired of feigning a normal life. She’d rather embrace her strange ability to track local predators and kill them with a kiss. And when her best friend dies, she demands a secretive werewolf help her cross the veil to bring the dead girl back. When her shifter partner reveals the truth behind Nic’s forgotten history, she pushes further into the treacherous Fae realm. But when she trains with the Wild Hunt warriors, she may be signing a magical contract with deathly consequences.

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

Change or die: the only options available on the Durallium Company-owned planet GP. The planet's deadly virus had killed most of the original colonists - and changed the rest irrevocably. Centuries after the colony had lost touch with the rest of humanity, the Company returned to exploit GP, and its forces found themselves fighting for their lives. Afraid of spreading the virus, the Company had left its remaining employees in place, afraid and isolated from the natives.

Nick Seagrave is a disillusioned business executive who has lost loved ones to tragedy and his family to neglect. Now, at a point of great crisis, he finds himself inexplicably transported to what appears to be another world. Suddenly he's confronted with profoundly clear views of his own past and personality. And he's enabled to see, hear, taste, and smell the realities of both heaven and hell - realities that force him to face dangers and trials far greater than any he's known before.