A colony of moss does not express preferences for certain people, living or dead. But if such a colony of moss did decide to reveal its favourites, let us just say You might be surprised.In 2018, a young forensic scientist, homesick and adrift in the North of England, is heading to a coroner's office to identify a body.In 50 BCE, a female druid is travelling to a city in the South where she will appear before the new king.And underfoot, all along, a teeming colony of moss is opening its wet mouth, waiting.In this wonderfully strange, multi-layered story, the unexpected discovery of an ancient bog body becomes a pinprick of light in the depths of humanity's history.

In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn't always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible a young foreign man who appears outside her window.One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known. Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life. The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king. For the TV tie-in edition with the same ISBN go to this Alternate Cover Edition <bar<

Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches”: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.

Is there anyone you wish to see? When Hirase, a young woman from Tokyo, arranges an appointment with the Go-Between, she doesn't expect a teenager to show up. Dressed preppily in a duffel coat and carrying a scuffed notebook, he arranges for the dead to meet the living. At least, this is what Hirase has been told. He ushers his clients into a chilly hospital courtyard where he lays down the rules: the reunion is at full moon; the deceased can be summoned only once; they can refuse; the service is entirely free. - Hirase asks to see the TV star who once helped her; - A stubborn family man asks his deceased mother where the deeds are to some land; - A young woman gets a horrible shock when she receives a message from the best friend whose death she caused; - A weary salary man explores why his girlfriend went missing days after he proposed. With each heartbreaking reunion, clues are scattered for readers to piece together the mindblowing truth behind the boy in the duffel coat, as Tsujimura shows with astonishing empathy and insight how the power of memory can give our lives meaning.

An astonishing coming-of-middle-age debut about an Ahkwesáhsne man’s reluctant return home, Old School Indian is a striking exploration of the resonance of love and family, culture and history.Forty-three-year-old Abe Jacobs has been told by his doctors that he’s dying—and fast. Having exhausted his doctors’ regimens, he begins to contemplate the one path he thought he’d never a healing at the hands of his great uncle Budge Billings. His uncle still lives on the Ahkwesáhsne reservation where Abe was raised, so more than two decades after leaving, Abe reluctantly returns home.Budge, a wry, unceremonious, recovered alcoholic, is not the least bit sentimental about his gift. Which is good, because Abe’s last-ditch attempt to be healed is just that—a fragile hope, one of which he is thoroughly skeptical. But no healing is possible without hope or knowing oneself. To find both faith and himself again, Abe must confront how leaving the reservation at eighteen has affected him, and the loves and fears that have kept him far from home ever since.Delivered with crackling wit and wildly inventive linguistic turns by Abe’s wise-cracking, would-be-poet alter-ego, Dominick Deer Woods,Old School Indian possesses the insight into the contemporary indigenous experience of Tommy Orange’s There There and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, and a singularity of voice that evokes other unforgettable protagonists like Ocean Vuong’s Little Dog and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.

A colony of moss does not express preferences for certain people, living or dead. But if such a colony of moss did decide to reveal its favourites, let us just say You might be surprised.In 2018, a young forensic scientist, homesick and adrift in the North of England, is heading to a coroner's office to identify a body.In 50 BCE, a female druid is travelling to a city in the South where she will appear before the new king.And underfoot, all along, a teeming colony of moss is opening its wet mouth, waiting.In this wonderfully strange, multi-layered story, the unexpected discovery of an ancient bog body becomes a pinprick of light in the depths of humanity's history.

A young royal from the far north is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for. At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history. Nghi Vo returns to the empire of Ahn and The Singing Hills Cycle in this mesmerizing, lush standalone follow-up to The Empress of Salt and Fortune.