Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. The final installment in the bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel series about life, love, and everything that happens in between. Everyone in school knows Nick and Charlie. Everyone knows they're going to be together forever. But Charlie's busy with his bid to become head boy. And while Nick is preparing to leave for uni, he's starting to wonder who he'll be . . . without Charlie. Contains discussions around mental health and eating disorders, and sexual references.

Over the past six years, Michael Novacek, Dean of Science at the American Museum of Natural History, has led a team of international scientists to Mongolia's Gobi Desert on the greatest dinosaur expedition of the late twentieth century. Closed to the West since the 1920s and opened only to Michael Novacek's team, the remote sands of the Gobi Desert constitute the richest fossil site in the world. In Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, Novacek takes the reader along with his team as he re-creates the day-to-day drama of field exploration over the last six years and recounts the remarkable discoveries that he and his colleagues unearthed. Following early years of relative disappointment, in 1993 the expedition discovered the richest Cretaceous dinosaur site ever found, excavating fossils that have helped to reshape our understanding of the dinosaur and early mammal era. Interweaving the adventure of field research with chapters that offer in depth discussions on contemporary dinosaur research and science, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs makes for the best kind of science--an engrossing narrative that brings compellingly to life the thrill and excitement of scientific discovery.

Four strangers are brought together to participate in an experimental treatment designed to heal broken hearts in this surprising and heartfelt debut novel from author Amelia Ireland. In a perfectly ordinary building, four strangers who couldn't be more different meet for the first time. Their skepticism of this new kind of grief therapy—and the unnervingly perceptive group leader—means they're all wary, but as the weeks go by, they find themselves returning again and again, pulled to work toward healing, even if it means first facing the pain head-on. A sharp-tongued lawyer who has no intention of letting down her walls, a fragile young woman looking for a place to belong, a musician at the top of his game who's one drink away from losing it all, and an interior designer facing the crumbling of her picture-perfect life—this unlikely group slowly opens up, not only to the possibility of a happier future but to friendship, change, and even romance. When a shocking revelation reveals the real reason they were chosen for this group, it shakes the very foundation of what they thought they knew. What began as a journey designed to heal turns out to be a much greater test of friendship, strength, and love as they realize happiness is just outside the door...if they're brave enough to seek it.

Flush with hundreds of illustrations, this book revisits the histories of chemistry, medicine, ideas, and culture through the lens of alchemy The craft of alchemy has intrigued and mystified people since antiquity. Many early cultures are known to have experimented with chemical transformations: from dyes, glazes, and cosmetics in Bronze Age Egypt to life-extending elixirs pursued by scholars in ancient China and India. Many have also attempted to transform lead, mercury, and other metals into gold—and some claim to have succeeded. In this visually stunning volume, Philip Ball sets alchemy within the context of the history of science and culture, showing that it was not simply an esoteric fantasy but an important phase in the development of experimental science and natural philosophy. Rich illustrations complement a narrative history of the methods and techniques developed in alchemical workshops, the search for the philosopher’s stone and “elixirs of life” that extended across diverse cultures, and the controversies surrounding the practices of making alchemical gold and alchemical medicine. Ball explores the rise of alchemy from its inception in Hellenistic culture, through the golden age of Islamic natural philosophy in the eighth to the eleventh centuries, to the emergence of the tradition of natural magic in the Renaissance, and to the roles of alchemical thought and practice in the beginnings of early modern science in the seventeenth century. He traces the persistence of alchemical ideas through the occult revival of the late nineteenth century and the fascination of the topic for modern artists and writers. This engaging and accessible book will provide readers of all backgrounds with a nuanced understanding of alchemy and its history.

The thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it. The forests of Northeast Asia are home to a marvelous range of animals—fish owls and brown bears, musk deer and moose, wolves and raccoon dogs, and leopards and tigers. But in the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell and catastrophe arrived, as poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species. Just as these changes arrived, scientists came together to found the Siberian Tiger Project. Led by the moose researcher Dale Miquelle and Zhenya Smirnov, who studied rodents, the team captured and released more than 114 tigers over three decades, witnessed their mating rituals and fights, their hunting and feeding, their ceding and taking of territory, their creation of families. Within the pages of Jonathan C. Slaght’s Tigers Between Empires, these characters, both feline and human, come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. We travel across time, too, as the species is shaped by the history and politics of empires—like the Qing dynasty’s Willow Palisade that once slowed human settlement, or the later introduction of roads through Russian reserves. The Siberian Tiger Project became the longest running tiger research initiative anywhere in the world; its work continues to guide conservationists today.

“An essential book for this moment.”—Rob Sheffield The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed. Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same fighting oppression. With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a binge-worthy, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

They were an unlikely pair—a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously—but Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel from the national bestselling author of Mrs. Poe and The Woman with the Cure.In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it. Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at capturing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet. But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental. Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.A lavish and transporting novel, When We Were Brilliant captures the halcyon days of an icon and the grit of women determining their own futures as it explores the exceptional and complicated friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold.

From RuPaul’s Drag Race winner and host of HBO’s We’re Here comes an inventive, wondrous novel about American hero Harriet Tubman that remixes history into a fresh, dynamic novel about love, freedom, salvation, and music. In an age of miracles where our greatest heroes from history have magically, unexplainably returned to shake us out of our confusion and hate, Harriet Tubman is back, and she has a lot to say. Harriet Tubman and four of the enslaved persons she led to freedom want to tell their story in a unique way—by following in the footsteps of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Harriet wants to put on a show about her life, and she needs a songwriter to help her. She calls upon Darnell Williams, a once successful hip-hop producer who was topping the charts before being outed by a rival at the BET Awards. Darnell has no idea what to expect when he steps into the studio with Harriet, only that they have one week to write a Broadway caliber musical she can take on the road. Over the course of their time together, they not only mount a show that will take the country by storm, but confront the horrors of both their pasts, and learn to find a way to a better future. Original, evocative, and historic, Harriet Live in Concert is a landmark achievement that will burrow deep into our hearts (and ears).

I knew the smell of death well enough. But here the sweetness of decay was tainted with something else, something new and different. It was a curious, moist smell; a smell that spoke of the ooze and slap of water, of gurgling wet spaces and the sticky, yielding mud of low-tide... Summoned to the riverside by the desperate, scribbled note of an old friend, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain find themselves on board the seamen's floating hospital, an old hulk known only as The Blood, where prejudice, ambition and murder seethe beneath a veneer of medical respectability. On shore, a young woman, a known prostitute, is found drowned in a derelict boatyard. A man leaps to his death into the Thames, driven mad by poison and fear. The events are linked - but how? Courting danger in the opium dens and brothels of the waterfront, certain that the Blood lies at the heart of the puzzle, Jem and Will embark on a quest to uncover the truth. In a hunt that takes them from the dissecting tables of a private anatomy school to the squalor of the dock-side mortuary, they find themselves involved in a dark and terrible mystery.

The year is 1348. Thomas, a disgraced knight, has found a young girl alone in a dead Norman village. An orphan of the Black Death, and an almost unnerving picture of innocence, she tells Thomas that plague is only part of a larger cataclysm—that the fallen angels under Lucifer are rising in a second war on heaven, and that the world of men has fallen behind the lines of conflict. Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned. As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.

'Secrets don't stay secret for long in publishing' Six authors. One private island. Seventy-two hours to write the ending that will change their lives. ‘This is a house of novelists, not murderers. You dream up crimes. You don’t commit them.’ ‘But a writer has. And so, who better than a writer to catch them?’ World famous author Arthur Fletch is dead. His final novel, the most anticipated book in history, remains unfinished. But the ending won’t write itself. Fletch’s publisher, Merriweather Press, has invited six authors to Fletch’s private island in Scotland. Authors whose books have never had the big marketing budgets or publicity opportunities. In other words, midlist. And they’re about to be presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. Whoever writes a worthy ending will receive one million dollars, and a further one million dollars for a new three-book contract. They have just seventy-two hours, with no access to the outside world, just a typewriter and a blank page. All they have to do is write… Starting is often the hardest part. But getting to the end could be murder. ‘Smart, original and completely addictive…The Ending Writes Itself is both a great locked-room thriller and a brilliant satire on the publishing industry. An absolute must-read’ Karin Slaughter