Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a man whose job it is to range through past and present Centuries, monitoring and, where necessary, altering Time's myriad cause-and-effect relationships. But when Harlan meets and falls for a non-Eternal woman, he seeks to use the awesome powers and techniques of the Eternals to twist time for his own purposes, so that he and his love can survive together.

A philosophy student is terrorised by a witch as he holds a vigil over the the dead body of a beautiful girl.

Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness. The story 'Omelas" was first published in 'New Dimensions 3' (1973), a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973, and the following year it won the prestigious Hugo Award for best short story. The work was subsequently printed in Le Guin's short story collection 'The Wind's Twelve Quarters' (1975). Ursula K Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American writer who published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry & four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, and more. She was known for her treatment of gender ('The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969), 'The Matter of Seggri' (1994)), political systems ('The Telling' (2000), 'The Dispossessed' (1974)) and difference/otherness in any other form.

The Grand Inquisitor is a section from The Brothers Karamazov, which is a literary work by Russian author/philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky. The central character in this work is a Grand Inquisitor who arrests Jesus. A Grand Inquisitor, or Inquisitor Generalis in German is the individual who leads an Inquisition, just like Spanish Dominican Tomas de Torquemada who was the official in charge of the Spanish Inquisition.

As it examines the real man behind the New Testament image of Jesus, this book presents an immensely provocative and attractive portrait of Jesus as a real person and a great spiritual teacher--an image acceptable to readers of any religion or of no religion. Mitchell is the acclaimed author of Parables and Portraits and has translated the Tao Te Ching and The Book of Job.

Provocative, haunting, and indelible, Colm Tóibín’s portrait of Mary presents her as a solitary older woman still seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity. In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel—her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it;” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died—she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgment of others. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes, in Toibin’s searing evocation, a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. This tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.

Spirals... this town is contaminated with spirals... Kurouzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral — the hypnotic secret shape of the world. This bizarre masterpiece of horror manga is now available in a single volume. Fall into a whirlpool of terror!

From the wastes of the sea to the shadows of our own cities, we are not alone. But what happens where the human world touches the domain of races ancient and alien? Museum curators, surveyors, police officers, archaeologists, mathematicians; from derelict buildings to country houses to the London Underground, another world is just a breath away, around the corner, watching and waiting for you to step into its power. The Private Life of Elder Things is a collection of new Lovecraftian fiction about confronting, discovering and living alongside the creatures of the Mythos.

A Colder War is an alternate history novelette by Charles Stross. It follows a "What If" scenario where the follow-up expedition in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" has occurred, and inexorably fuses the Cold War and Cthulhu Mythos.

The exploits and influence through four centuries of Europe's first great maritime empire an empire which at its peak virtually girdled the earth. In the series of which this volume is a part distinguished historians trace the course of human society from its prehistoric beginnings to the atomic age.

As remarkable as Columbus and the conquistador expeditions, the history of Portuguese exploration is now almost forgotten. But Portugal's navigators cracked the code of the Atlantic winds, launched the expedition of Vasco da Gama to India and beat the Spanish to the spice kingdoms of the East - then set about creating the first long-range maritime empire. In an astonishing blitz of thirty years, a handful of visionary and utterly ruthless empire builders, with few resources but breathtaking ambition, attempted to seize the Indian Ocean, destroy Islam and take control of world trade. Told with Roger Crowley's customary skill and verve, this is narrative history at its most vivid - an epic tale of navigation, trade and technology, money and religious zealotry, political diplomacy and espionage, sea battles and shipwrecks, endurance, courage and terrifying brutality. Drawing on extensive first-hand accounts, it brings to life the exploits of an extraordinary band of conquerors - men such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the first European since Alexander the Great to found an Asian empire - who set in motion five hundred years of European colonisation and unleashed the forces of globalisation.

José de Alencar's love story, which might be thought of as a Brazilian "Pocahontas," tells how Iracema meets and falls in love with the Portuguese colonist Martim. Their child, named Moacir, represents the union of the Portuguese with the native people, from whom the Brazilian people arise. But, tragically, Iracema dies, metaphorically demonstrating that the cost of this union is the life of the native peoples of Brazil. Iracema is considered the most important work of Brazil's romantic period, and one of the most important novels in the 500 years of Brazilian literature.

Somewhere on the borders of what is now Russia, in the late 9th century A.D., the great kaghan, ruler of the Khazars, summons the three leading scholars of the known world—Christian, Jewish, Moslem—to debate before the court which religion he and his people will adopt. This is the last thing we know about the Khazars, for in the immediate aftermath of this event, the tribe is utterly destroyed, vanishing from history... In 1689, in the lost lands where the Danube empties into the Black Sea, the Turks and Slavs are engaged in pitched battle. In the fighting, three men come face to face: Avram Brancovich, the noble warlord and litterateur; Yusuf Masudi, the Turkish lute player; and Samuel Cohen, the Jew. Each has (literally) dreamed the existence of the other two and has been tracking them down; at the moment of their encounter, all three die... Three hundred years later, in 1982 in Istanbul, three scholars (Christian, Jew, Moslem) come together to pool their separately compiled fragmentary information about the lost tribe of the Khazars, once known to have been gathered into a single book of knowledge, The Khazar Dictionary, published in 1691 in an edition of 500 copies. 498 were destroyed by the Inquisition, one was 'consumed' and one, the "Golden Book" (with poisoned inks), survived, deadly to any Unbeliever who ignored the warnings and read more than nine pages. Now, once again at the precise moment when the three scholars may together be able to reconstitute at least part of the dictionary, two of them die... What is the story of the Khazars? Milorad Pavic gives us the search for the Dictionary and a reconstructed possible version of the Dictionary, all in one. The rest is up to us...