In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.

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.

The girl knows she has a destiny before she even knows her name. She grows up in the wild, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake come to her on the spring breeze, and when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she knows that her future lies at his court. And so, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and, with a broken hunting spear and mended armour, rides on a bony gelding to Caer Leon.

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial even proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger.

Tesla Crane, one of the richest women in the world, is on her honeymoon on an interplanetary space liner, cruising between Earth and Mars. She’s traveling incognito and is reveling in her anonymity. Then someone is murdered and her husband is named as the prime suspect. To save him from the frame-up, Tesla will risk exposure and face demons from her past. Even though doing so might make her the next victim.

"That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?" Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown.

The sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse have destroyed most of the planet…yet out of these waters, Dinétah, a former Navajo reservation, has been miraculously reborn. Listen along as Tanis Parenteau's impeccable narration, capturing the rhythms of Navajo speech, fully envelopes you into the Sixth World. Trail of Lightning follows our heroine as she walks the land alongside gods, heroes of legend, and monsters alike.

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn't an accident - or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court. Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her station from Teixcalaan's unceasing expansion.

Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning to the way he completes his homework - without complaint, without fuss, without prompt. Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable. They live on the same street. They live in different worlds.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android.

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa ­­- a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past. Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks - alone, except for her fox companion - searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

When you listen to Lily and the Octopus, you will be taken on an unforgettable ride. The magic of this novel is in the listening, and we don't want to spoil it by giving away too many details. We can tell you that this is a story about that special someone: the one you trust, the one you can't live without. For Ted Flask, that someone special is his aging companion, Lily, who happens to be a dog.

Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: To escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four.

Dr. Rhea Lynch left a suffocating life in Charleston to practice medicine in the ER of a small South Carolina Hospital. Now, Dawkins County is her home, a place that holds the only real family she's ever known. But when she returns from vacation, Rhea is shocked to discover that her best friend, Marisa, is near death and unable to communicate. The official diagnosis: a paralyzing stroke. Despite the family's attempts to keep her away, Rhea is determined to make her own diagnosis.

”When I was little I believed in Jesus and Santa, spontaneous combustion, and the Loch Ness Monster. Now I believe in science, statistics, and antibiotics.” So says 17-year-old Zac Meier during a long, grueling leukemia treatment in Perth, Australia. A loud blast of Lady Gaga alerts him to the presence of Mia, the angry, not-at-all-stoic cancer patient in the room next door. Once released, the two near-strangers can't forget each other, even as they desperately try to resume normal lives.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

They call it Company Town - a city-size oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bioengineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig - making her doubly an outsider as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire.

Nursing the faded scars of a long-held trauma, Emily Page and her husband, awaiting the arrival of their first child, move from New York City to the uber-wealthy Clairmont, Texas. There, Emily is swept into a world of opulent privilege and shifting loyalties. But the secrets she keeps follow her south, and with them comes the danger that her new friends can't protect her from, and her new enemies will not hesitate to use to destroy her once and for all.

Evie and her uncle Jim have just moved to an isolated cabin in a remote beach town - a far cry from their hometown of Melbourne. But Evie isn't her real name. And Jim isn't really her uncle. Jim tells Evie she did something terrible back home, that he's hiding her to protect her. But Evie can't remember anything about that night - for all she knows, he's lying. As fragments of her memory return, she starts to wonder if Jim is really her savior...or her captor.

Abbie Devereaux lies flat on her back, her arms and legs tied down, her head covered with a hood. She senses the eyes that watch her. She feels the unknown hands that touch her in the dark. She knows she has been kidnapped but has little memory of her recent past. And she knows that all she has to do is stay alive, even though everything she is experiencing tells her she won't.

The Incrementalists - a secret society of 200 people with an unbroken lineage reaching back 40,000 years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations, races, and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, just a little bit at a time. Their ongoing argument about how to do this is older than most of their individual memories. Phil, whose personality has stayed stable through more incarnations than anyone else’s, has loved Celeste - and argued with her - for most of the last 400 years.

On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old Realtor, had three goals: sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she’s about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.

Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is trying to live a quiet life. The last thing her husband wants is for her to go running off on another dangerous mission to help illegal refugees. But when Nina's estranged friend, Karin, leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, and begs her to take care of its contents, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous case yet.

Profoundly deaf since early childhood, Caleb has always lived on the outside - watching and picking up tell-tale signs people hide in a smile, a cough or a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone....

Cassie Salazar and Luke Morrow couldn't be more different. Sharp-witted Cassie works nights at a bar in Austin, Texas, to make ends meet while pursuing her dream of becoming a singer/songwriter. Luke is an army trainee, about to ship out for duty, who finds comfort in the unswerving discipline of service. But a chance encounter at Cassie's bar changes the course of both their lives.

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backward, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

Tim Hess is a semiretired veteran cop staring at a death sentence - his own. Detective Merci Rayborn, young enough to be his daughter, is brash, impatient, and not someone from whom Hess wants to be taking orders. He certainly isn't planning on falling in love with her. Together, they must track down a psychopathic killer who's been abducting beautiful young women from the malls of Orange County.

Building on the tradition of Little Bee, Chris Cleave again writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption. Gold is the story of Zoe and Kate, world-class athletes who have been friends and rivals since their first day of Elite training. They've loved, fought, betrayed, forgiven, consoled, gloried, and grown up together. Now on the eve of London 2012, their last Olympics, both women will be tested to their physical and emotional limits.