皇帝の手術を無事に終えてから半月、季節も冬へと近づいていた。 術後の治療を上級医官に替わってもらったおかげで、 猫猫（マオマオ）の日常は忙しくも平常運転へと戻っていた。 そんなある日、老医官に届いた文を読んだ妤（ヨ）の顔色が変わった。 「怖いことになるかもしれない」。 その文には水膨れができた患者が増えていると書かれていたのだ。 嫌な予感がする猫猫だったが、その心配は当たってしまった。 「疱瘡（ほうそう）の発生」。 感染力、致死率が高く、顔や身体に痕が残りやすく恐れられている流行り病だ。 特効薬はなく、猫猫でも今から見つけることは不可能だろう。 感染が広まれば村一つが閉鎖することもあるという。 そんな絶望的な状況に一筋の光を放ったのは、 かつて疱瘡から快復した経験を持つ妤の一言だった。 「私が生き残ったのは、そのお医者さんのおかげです」。 疱瘡に詳しい民間の医者----猫猫が知るのは克用(コクヨウ)しかいなかった。 猫猫が時折、花街の薬屋に応援を依頼する、顔半分に疱瘡の痕がある美青年。 厄介な感染病の大流行に備えて医者はいくらいたっていい。 しかも疱瘡の知識と耐性があるならなおさらだ。 克用は医官たちの面接を経て採用され、妤と共に感染が広がりつつある 人口数百人の農村に派遣されることになった。 また、ある時、猫猫は壬氏（ジンシ）から皇太后の実家の当主の娘が、 とある人物に呪いをかけたのではないかとの相談を持ち掛けられる。 当主の娘とは妾の子であり、皇太后の姪にあたる病弱な梔子（ジーズー）。 その姪を助けてほしいという「皇太后からの頼み」により猫猫が調べを進めると、 梔子に毒が盛られていた疑いが出てくる。 そして、その背景には母親である妾の思いが透けて見えてくるのだった。 一方、疱瘡の感染拡大防止に奮闘していた妤から話を聞いていた猫猫に、 大きな疑問が浮かんだ。 「その疱瘡はどこから来たのか?」。 疱瘡の感染源を調べるうちに、猫猫たちは衝撃の事実にたどり着くのだが……。

皇帝の手術を無事に終えてから半月、季節も冬へと近づいていた。 術後の治療を上級医官に替わってもらったおかげで、 猫猫（マオマオ）の日常は忙しくも平常運転へと戻っていた。 そんなある日、老医官に届いた文を読んだ妤（ヨ）の顔色が変わった。 「怖いことになるかもしれない」。 その文には水膨れができた患者が増えていると書かれていたのだ。 嫌な予感がする猫猫だったが、その心配は当たってしまった。 「疱瘡（ほうそう）の発生」。 感染力、致死率が高く、顔や身体に痕が残りやすく恐れられている流行り病だ。 特効薬はなく、猫猫でも今から見つけることは不可能だろう。 感染が広まれば村一つが閉鎖することもあるという。 そんな絶望的な状況に一筋の光を放ったのは、 かつて疱瘡から快復した経験を持つ妤の一言だった。 「私が生き残ったのは、そのお医者さんのおかげです」。 疱瘡に詳しい民間の医者----猫猫が知るのは克用(コクヨウ)しかいなかった。 猫猫が時折、花街の薬屋に応援を依頼する、顔半分に疱瘡の痕がある美青年。 厄介な感染病の大流行に備えて医者はいくらいたっていい。 しかも疱瘡の知識と耐性があるならなおさらだ。 克用は医官たちの面接を経て採用され、妤と共に感染が広がりつつある 人口数百人の農村に派遣されることになった。 また、ある時、猫猫は壬氏（ジンシ）から皇太后の実家の当主の娘が、 とある人物に呪いをかけたのではないかとの相談を持ち掛けられる。 当主の娘とは妾の子であり、皇太后の姪にあたる病弱な梔子（ジーズー）。 その姪を助けてほしいという「皇太后からの頼み」により猫猫が調べを進めると、 梔子に毒が盛られていた疑いが出てくる。 そして、その背景には母親である妾の思いが透けて見えてくるのだった。 一方、疱瘡の感染拡大防止に奮闘していた妤から話を聞いていた猫猫に、 大きな疑問が浮かんだ。 「その疱瘡はどこから来たのか?」。 疱瘡の感染源を調べるうちに、猫猫たちは衝撃の事実にたどり着くのだが……。

February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the staff navigate the hotel's labyrinthine 'below stairs' to ensure the finest service is always at hand. In the early evening, psychoanalyst Nora Dickinson checks in under a false name. It's unlike Nora to deceive – her aversion to lying borders on the pathological – but she's travelling with an agenda. Having shadowed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich, she's determined not to lose sight of her now. But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, reality appears to shift. Nora's grip loosens, and the nightmares she's worked hard to control begin to bare their teeth.

In a faraway land where members of the royal family are named for the virtues they embody, one young boy will become a walking enigma. Born on the wrong side of the sheets, Fitz, son of Chivalry Farseer, is a royal bastard, cast out into the world, friendless and lonely. Only his magical link with animals - the old art known as the Wit - gives him solace and companionship. But the Wit, if used too often, is a perilous magic, and one abhorred by the nobility. So when Fitz is finally adopted into the royal household, he must give up his old ways and embrace a new life of weaponry, scribing, courtly manners; and how to kill a man secretly, as he trains to become a royal assassin.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, book one of The Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion. Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter. It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them. One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable. Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity. Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar's niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan's motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war. The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making. Speak again the ancient oaths: Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before Destination. and return to men the Shards they once bore. The Knights Radiant must stand again.

The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe, the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of The Canterbury Tales. If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.

In When Christ and His Saints Slept master storyteller and historian Sharon Kay Penman illuminates one of the lesser-known but fascinating periods of English history. The next addition in this highly acclaimed historical fiction series of the middle ages, and the first of a trilogy that will tell the story of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. When Christ and His Saints Slept begins with the death of King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror and father of Maude, his only living legitimate offspring.

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s. Robin Buss’s lively English translation is complete and unabridged, and remains faithful to the style of Dumas’s original. This edition includes an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden sex worker, can offer the chance of redemption.

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.