Debut author Shen Tao introduces readers to the lush, deadly world of The Poet Empress, a sweeping, epic and intimate fantasy perfect for fans of The Serpent & the Wings of Night, The Song of Achilles and She Who Became the Sun. Wei Yin is desperate. After the fifth death of a sibling, with her family and village on the brink of starvation, she will do anything to save those she loves. Even offer herself as concubine to the cruel, dissolute heir of the blood-gutted Azalea House—where poetry magic is power, but women are forbidden to read. But in a twist of fate, the palace now stands on the knife-edge of civil war, with Wei trapped in its center. . . with a violent prince. To save herself and the nation, she must survive the dangers of court, learn to read in secret, and compose the most powerful spell of all. A ballad of love. . . and death. The Poet Empress is an epic fantasy that explores darker themes, subjects, and scenes that may not be suitable for all readers. Please see the author's content note at the beginning of the book.

From holy cup comes holy light; The faithful hand sets world aright. And in the Seven Martyrs’ sight, Mere man shall end this endless night. It has been twenty-seven long years since the last sunrise. For nearly three decades, vampires have waged war against humanity; building their eternal empire even as they tear down our own. Now, only a few tiny sparks of light endure in a sea of darkness.Gabriel de León is a silversaint: a member of a holy brotherhood dedicated to defending realm and church from the creatures of the night. But even the Silver Order could not stem the tide once daylight failed us, and now, only Gabriel remains.Imprisoned by the very monsters he vowed to destroy, the last silversaint is forced to tell his story. A story of legendary battles and forbidden love, of faith lost and friendships won, of the Wars of the Blood and the Forever King and the quest for humanity’s last remaining hope: The Holy Grail. From author Jay Kristoff comes Empire of the Vampire, the first illustrated volume of an astonishing new dark fantasy saga.

Louise, la trentaine, est une ancienne musicienne de rock, reconvertie dans la techno. Un matin, au réveil, elle met un disque et replonge vers le passé. Elle a envie de revenir en arrière sans régresser. Louise a besoin et envie de choses simples : toucher la peau d'un garçon, écouter des chansons qui racontent des histoires. Elle est mûre pour une nouvelle chance. Et aussi pour un dérapage, sans doute inévitable

From holy cup comes holy light; The faithful hand sets world aright. And in the Seven Martyrs’ sight, Mere man shall end this endless night. It has been twenty-seven long years since the last sunrise. For nearly three decades, vampires have waged war against humanity; building their eternal empire even as they tear down our own. Now, only a few tiny sparks of light endure in a sea of darkness.Gabriel de León is a silversaint: a member of a holy brotherhood dedicated to defending realm and church from the creatures of the night. But even the Silver Order could not stem the tide once daylight failed us, and now, only Gabriel remains.Imprisoned by the very monsters he vowed to destroy, the last silversaint is forced to tell his story. A story of legendary battles and forbidden love, of faith lost and friendships won, of the Wars of the Blood and the Forever King and the quest for humanity’s last remaining hope: The Holy Grail. From author Jay Kristoff comes Empire of the Vampire, the first illustrated volume of an astonishing new dark fantasy saga.

A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel. My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel. My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

See ancient Rome, and peer into the Roman mind, through the eyes of a gladiator—from the evening before the games at the Colosseum to the evening after "A grippingly original way of making the alien world of the Roman Amphitheatre both accessible and comprehensible." —Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History What did a gladiator feel when he stepped out onto the sand of the Colosseum, his life in the balance? What ran through the minds of the masses there to witness his likely execution? And how did this bloodthirsty ritual come to exist in the first place? In Those Who Are About to Die, Harry Sidebottom—an internationally bestselling novelist and professor of classical history at Oxford—pulls us into the arena, and into the homes and forums of ancient Rome, taking the listener on an eye-opening, twenty-four-hour tour through Roman life at the height of the gladiatorial games, from the first century BC to the second century AD. We follow the gladiators through the schools (ludi) where they trained, watch in awe as the massive event unfolds—from the gambling at the pre-festival dinner, to the dawn rush to get a seat at the arena, to the resounding music, the elaborate stage sets, and, yes, the public executions that served as lunch-break entertainment—and we unlearn all the bogus movie tropes (no, alas, gladiators did not have ripped bods, they were kept fleshy so they’d bleed more). Broken down by time of day—Vesper, Prima Vigilia, Secunda Vigilia, up through the following sunset (Solis Occasus)—Those Who Are About to Die offers illuminating insights into every aspect of the life and mind of ancient Romans, their social mores and hierarchies, their thoughts on death and sex and violence, and the myths and dreams that fueled the spectacle. With wit and authority, Those Who Are About to Die gives us the truth behind a figure we can’t stop imagining.

From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart’s singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford’s biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.

From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Gillig comes a sensational romantasy, a gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a young prophetess forced on an impossible quest with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight. Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum’s windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams. Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil’s visions. But when Sybil’s fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral’s cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she’d rather avoid Rodrick’s dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.

Alles beginnt, sogar das Ende, als Lajos von Lázár, das blonde Kind mit den wasserblauen Augen, zur Welt kommt. Seinem Vater, dem Baron, wird der Sohn nie geheuer sein, als ob er dessen Geheimnis ahnte. Mit Lajos' Geburt im Waldschloss bricht auch das 20. Jahrhundert an, das das alte Leben der Barone Lázár im südlichen Ungarn für immer verändern wird. Der Untergang des Habsburgerreichs berührt erst nur ihre Traditionen, aber alle spüren das Beben der Zeit, die schöne Mária ebenso wie der geisterhafte Onkel Imre. Als Lajos in den zwanziger Jahren sein Erbe antritt, scheint der alte Glanz noch einmal aufzublühen. Doch die Kinder Eva und Pista – der das Dunkle so liebt – müssen erleben, wie totalitäre Zeiten ihre wuchtigen Schatten werfen – und lernen, gegen sie zu bestehen.Ein Roman wie eine Welt, die überwältigende Saga einer Familie, getrieben von der Liebe und der Sehnsucht nach ihr, in den Strudeln des 20. Jahrhunderts. Fesselnd und berührend, zugleich voller Leichtigkeit, voller Träume und Geheimnisse, in denen sich die ganze Tragik und Schönheit der Existenz spiegelt. Und – ob angesichts historischer Katastrophen oder schöner Sommertage – die ewige Frage, wie man leben soll.

The exceptionally vivid, rare, and revealing journals of a 16th-century medical student. In 1552, at the age of sixteen, Felix Platter left his home in Basel, Switzerland, and journeyed 370 miles to Montpelier, in the south of France. There he spent the next five years studying to become a physician. It was an extraordinary education—and not only in medicine. A Protestant in a Catholic kingdom, Felix witnessed blood-chilling executions and engaged in secret religious discussions with his landlord, a Marrano Jew. He also learned to play the lute, tasted olive oil for the first time, and had his first swim in the sea. He flirted and danced; he got his spur tangled in a lady's skirt; he fled from highwaymen; he saw John Calvin preach; he survived an outbreak of the bubonic plague; he joined in a massive, orange-throwing food fight; he got a dog; and he spent one Christmas Eve alone and afraid of the dark. Most astonishing of all, he wrote it all down. The notes that Felix Platter kept on his day-to-day life are unique in European history. A century before the modern, Western novel was invented, Beloved Son Felix captures the texture of Renaissance life, and a Renaissance youth, from the inside. As Stephen Greenblatt observes in his introduction, “Keeping diaries and writing autobiographies did not become a widespread practice until the mid-seventeenth century. But it is not merely the relative paucity of such documents from earlier periods that makes Platter's journal so unusual. It is its vividness, intimacy, candor, and charm that confer upon it an altogether rare and revealing character.”

Louise, la trentaine, est une ancienne musicienne de rock, reconvertie dans la techno. Un matin, au réveil, elle met un disque et replonge vers le passé. Elle a envie de revenir en arrière sans régresser. Louise a besoin et envie de choses simples : toucher la peau d'un garçon, écouter des chansons qui racontent des histoires. Elle est mûre pour une nouvelle chance. Et aussi pour un dérapage, sans doute inévitable

Alles beginnt, sogar das Ende, als Lajos von Lázár, das blonde Kind mit den wasserblauen Augen, zur Welt kommt. Seinem Vater, dem Baron, wird der Sohn nie geheuer sein, als ob er dessen Geheimnis ahnte. Mit Lajos' Geburt im Waldschloss bricht auch das 20. Jahrhundert an, das das alte Leben der Barone Lázár im südlichen Ungarn für immer verändern wird. Der Untergang des Habsburgerreichs berührt erst nur ihre Traditionen, aber alle spüren das Beben der Zeit, die schöne Mária ebenso wie der geisterhafte Onkel Imre. Als Lajos in den zwanziger Jahren sein Erbe antritt, scheint der alte Glanz noch einmal aufzublühen. Doch die Kinder Eva und Pista – der das Dunkle so liebt – müssen erleben, wie totalitäre Zeiten ihre wuchtigen Schatten werfen – und lernen, gegen sie zu bestehen.Ein Roman wie eine Welt, die überwältigende Saga einer Familie, getrieben von der Liebe und der Sehnsucht nach ihr, in den Strudeln des 20. Jahrhunderts. Fesselnd und berührend, zugleich voller Leichtigkeit, voller Träume und Geheimnisse, in denen sich die ganze Tragik und Schönheit der Existenz spiegelt. Und – ob angesichts historischer Katastrophen oder schöner Sommertage – die ewige Frage, wie man leben soll.

A cuatro profesores de literatura, Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza y Norton, los une su fascinación por la obra de Beno von Archimboldi, un enigmático escritor alemán cuyo prestigio crece en todo el mundo. La complicidad se vuelve vodevil intelectual y desemboca en un peregrinaje a Santa Teresa (trasunto de Ciudad Juárez), donde hay quien dice que Archimboldi ha sido visto. Ya allí, Pelletier y Espinoza se enteran de que la ciudad es desde años atrás escenario de una larga cadena de crímenes: en los vertederos aparecen cadáveres de mujeres con señales de haber sido violadas y torturadas. Es el primer asomo de la novela a sus procelosos caudales, repletos de personajes memorables cuyas historias, a caballo entre la risa y el horror, abarcan dos continentes e incluyen un vertiginoso travelling por la historia europea del siglo XX. 2666 confirma el veredicto de Susan Sontag: "el más influyente y admirado novelista en lengua española de su generación. Su muerte, a los cincuenta años, es una gran pérdida para la literatura".

A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.